Outline lion cub with orange shading and two pink hibiscus flowers above the words hakuna matata in script, tattooed on the inner forearm near the wrist.

Lion cub and hakuna matata on the wrist

Fine line · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A lion cub is drawn in a dark red outline with orange shading inside the body and mane, sitting beside two pink hibiscus-style flowers. Black cursive script reading hakuna matata runs beneath the cub. The linework is clean and the colour is soft and watercolour-like, set against pale skin on the inner forearm near the wrist.

Fine line Lettering Forearm Lion cub Hibiscus Flower Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cub came to us from a jumble sale in Scarborough, wrapped in a carrier bag with a card tucked into one paw. The card said hakuna matata in pencil, the letters leaning as if they were tired. Nobody at the Pier Pavilion could say who had written it. Mrs Okonedo, who ran the box office and spoke four languages, said it meant no worries. Dennis, who ran the lights and spoke only one, said that was the sort of thing grown-ups told children the week before the rent was due.

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The cub was a flat rag of orange cloth with a red outline that never quite closed at the tail. Its mane was stitched in three shades of thread, and Dennis swore the thread had come from his nan's sewing tin. Every matinee it sat in the trunk with its face to the wall, and every matinee we had to coax it out with a custard cream and a whistle. We put it down to damp. The Pavilion was damp the way a sponge is damp, all the way through.

The winter the council shut the pier, we had eleven pounds, a broken generator and a storm coming in off the North Sea. Dennis sat on the trunk with his head in his hands and said the cub had finally given up. Mrs Okonedo didn't argue. She lifted the puppet out, shook the salt from its mane and held it up under the one bulb still working. Then she sang the only line of her grandmother's lullaby she had ever learned properly, and the cub, which had never once moved on its own, tipped its head and looked straight at us.

The show that night played to four people and a gull on the railing. Nobody got rich. But the next morning Dennis found a fresh card in the cub's paw, in handwriting none of us recognised, which read only: worries, tomorrow. We still don't know who left it there, and we have stopped asking.