Colour lion cub tattoo with black shading on the top of a foot, with the script words Remember and Who you are curving around it.

Lion cub and script on the foot

Lettering · Other · Colour · Photo

A lion cub is shown in orange ink with a soft black and grey shadow behind it, set in the centre of the design. Black script reading Remember and Who you are curves around the figure on the top of a foot. The orange figure dominates the composition, with the lettering framing it on two sides.

Lettering Other Lion cub Lion Script Lettering Foot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The boarding house on Scarrow Parade has eleven rooms, and you are not allowed to open the window of number six, because the sea gets in and the damp gets into the wallpaper. Gran Maud keeps the keys on a loop of blue ribbon and lets you carry them up the stairs when the lodgers are out. On the mantelpiece in the back parlour sits a wooden lion cub your grandad whittled the winter before he went to sea, its paint worn to bare grain on the belly where a hundred years of hands have held it.

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At dusk the lamp throws its shadow onto the wall, a dark ring behind the cub, and you have always thought it looked as if the cub was standing in its own shade. Maud says that's the best bit. She says anyone can carve a shape, but the shadow is where you learn what something is for. You are twelve and you think this is the kind of thing grown-ups say when they have run out of answers, and you tell her so, loudly, the night before the coach leaves for the city where your mum is waiting.

In the morning she is at the gate in her cardigan with the cub wrapped in an old handkerchief. She presses it into your coat pocket and says the thing her own father said to her at a different gate: remember who you are. You roll your eyes so hard the coach driver laughs. Then the coach pulls away, the bay goes silver behind you, and the town shrinks to a row of pale windows.

Somewhere past the second hill you take the cub out. The orange has rubbed thinner on your palm, but the shadow is still there in the dents of the grain, dark and patient, holding the small shape up against the light. You sit with it until the city appears, then turn it so the carriage lamp throws its ring across your knees, and you understand she was never talking about the lion.