Graphite drawing of a shaded lion cub silhouette within a circle, with the words Remember who you are beneath it, shown as a tattoo design.

Lion cub silhouette with quote

Black and grey · Flash

A greyscale pencil drawing shows a lion cub in profile, with its head bowed and one leg extended, outlined in heavy dark shading against a soft grey circular background. Smooth, graded shading gives the cub a raised, carved look, and the curled tail sweeps around the edge of the circle. The phrase Remember who you are is written in a clean handwritten-style script across the bottom of the image.

Lion cub Lion Circle Script Quote

Find an artist for this

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 breakdown happened forty kilometres past the last well, where the tarmac gave out into packed red grit and the wind kept shifting the dunes across the lane. Mira Sandoval had towed trucks on that road for nineteen years and knew the sound a dying radiator made. The boy by the verge looked like he belonged to nothing out there. He wore a school jumper too heavy for the afternoon and held a wooden lion no longer than his hand, its tail curled tight around a ring.

Keep reading

"Is someone meeting you in Tamarin?" she asked. He shook his head. The bus had dropped him at a fuel stop at dawn with a card that had his name on it and nothing else. He turned the carving over in his fingers. The cub's head was bowed, one foreleg stretched past the circle, as though caught between sleeping and standing. "Gran said remember who you are," he said. "She said if I forgot, I should look at the tail."

Mira hooked the truck up anyway, because the sky was going the colour of a bruise and no child should sit out in that wind. The cab smelled of diesel and the peppermints she kept for long hauls. Past the second milestone the boy traced the curl of the tail with his thumb and began humming something low and wordless, a tune she half remembered from her own mother's kitchen, and she found she was humming it too.

At the depot the radio crackled with a message from Tamarin. A woman had been waiting at the fuel stop since noon, asking after a boy with a carved lion. Mira handed him down from the cab. At the edge of the floodlight he stopped, turned, and held the little cub up so its curled tail caught the light, and the woman came running across the forecourt with her arms already open.