Orange and red lion cub tattoo with a bold black outline and black script reading Remember who you are, on skin that appears to be the upper back.

Lion cub and script tattoo

Back · Mixed · Photo

A bold lion cub lies in a curled, relaxed pose, drawn with a thick black outline and filled with orange and red tones. Beneath it, black cursive script reads Remember who you are. The tattoo is centred in the frame against plain skin.

Back Lion Lion cub Script Quote

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The big top at Wrexley Brothers has a hole in its canvas the size of a dinner plate, and you have been patching it since October with gaffer tape and a sailmaker's needle, because the money for proper canvas went on diesel. The cub is called Pilot. He is eleven weeks old, orange as a marmalade jar, and he sleeps in the last caravan on the field, the one with the broken cooker, curled into a question mark because the dog bed was too small and nobody bought another.

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Old Haskett, the ringmaster, comes out of the cookhouse with a mug of tea gone cold. He has not been sober since the Hartlepool date and he is not sober now. He watches you feed the cub from a bottle and says a lion who gets spoiled will never earn his keep. You tell him to shut his mouth. He says, "Remember who you are, girl, and remember who I am," and you laugh, because it sounds like something printed round the lid of a biscuit tin.

Then the winter comes in hard. The council man arrives with a clipboard and questions about paperwork, and the trailer's brakes fail on the A1 with the cub's crate strapped in the back. Haskett sits on the wagon step with his hands between his knees and tells you the truth in one breath: the cub goes to a sanctuary in Wales, or he goes nowhere.

You carry Pilot across the empty field at dawn, past the patched canvas and the rusted ring poles. The van is waiting with its doors open. He wakes against your shoulder and roars for the first time, a sound far too big for him, and it goes out over the frost where the crowds used to sit.