Fine line black outline tattoo of a lion cub with orange shading and the script words Remember who you are, on the side of a torso above a waistband.

Lion cub and script quote on the side ribs

Fine line · Ribs · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows a lion cub in a simple black outline with soft orange and yellow fill on its body and mane. Below it, the handwritten script words Remember who you are run across two lines in black ink. The photo is taken close up at an angle, with a polka dot top and a hand at the edge of the frame.

Fine line Ribs Lion cub Lion Script Quote Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the lot of you, and mind the brazier, because this is a story for cold nights and I am too old to tell it twice. Brother Anselm's mule came up the valley road in the snow the winter the bell cracked, and on its back, wrapped in a sheepskin, was a cub no longer than my forearm. Its mother had been shot by a drover who thought a lion's pelt would fetch a purse of silver from some lord in the south. The cub had a scorched rust-coloured mane where the fire had caught it, and it would not take the goat's milk until Anselm sat down in the straw and sang the psalms badly, which is the only way to make a monk useful.

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The cub grew. By spring it was stealing bread from the refectory table and sulking at the abbot. The brothers argued about it in chapter. Some wanted it sent down to the menagerie in the city, some wanted it put out of the way for the safety of the novices, and old Brother Dunstan, who had never agreed with anything in his life, said only that the beast had been named in its sleep and should be made to answer to it.

Nobody ever learned what the name was. On the night the cub first climbed the bell tower and sat roaring at the moon, the abbot went up with a lantern and came down pale, and he scratched four words into the lime of the scriptorium wall with the point of his knife, so that the next abbot would know them. The wall is still there. The words are worn to ghosts, but you can read them if you stand where the light from the window falls.

The cub went over the pass the autumn it was grown. On clear mornings, the brothers say, a roar comes back off the high rock, and they stop their work and put down their spades, because they know a voice that is only reminding itself of something. Now bank the fire and go to bed.