Black and grey outline tattoo of a lion cub above the cursive words Remember who you are, shown on skin.

Lion cub outline and Remember who you are script

Lettering · Black and grey · Photo

A cartoon-style lion cub is drawn in a black outline with soft grey shading, with its tail curling up to the right. Handwritten cursive script reading Remember who you are sits beneath the figure, with the line work slightly softened by shading. The ink is black and grey on a warm skin tone, and the tattoo fills the centre of a close, slightly angled frame.

Lettering Lion cub Lion Script Text Outline Cartoon

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain came sideways over Hallam Row that Saturday, and the tarpaulins sagged above the tables like wet sheets. I had my father's tin box open on the trestle, the one with a lion cub pressed into its lid, the paint worn to bare metal where a hundred thumbs had rubbed it for luck. Nobody had bid on it all morning. A man in a yellow cagoule picked it up, weighed it in his palm, and said it was only a biscuit tin.

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I didn't argue. My father always said the box had come with a message, though he never told me what it was. He only said the words when the stall was losing money and he felt brave, tapping the cub with one finger: remember who you are. I used to think it was the sort of thing men said to sell tea towels, and I told him so, and he laughed until he coughed.

The yellow cagoule man came back at four, when the light had gone grey and the other traders were stacking their crates. He had the tin under his arm and a look on his face like he had been turning something over all afternoon. He asked whether the box had ever been opened properly. I said no. He lifted the false floor with his thumbnail, and beneath it lay a folded letter in my father's careful hand, addressed to a boy called Tom who was, the letter said, to come back to the market when he was grown and ask for the lion.

I am not sure what I expected him to say. He only looked at the cub, then at me, and said, "Well, you've got his tail." I didn't know whether he meant the drawing or the stubbornness. I gave him the box for nothing, and went home in the rain.