Black and grey tattoo of a lion's face split into square tiles with realistic shading, on the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lion face broken into square tiles

Realism · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A lion's face, including its eyes, nose and whiskers, is broken into irregular square tiles that step diagonally across the skin. Each tile is shaded in black and grey with fine realistic detail, and some squares are solid black to suggest a pixelated effect. The image is a close, angled photograph of the upper arm, with a faint branch tattoo visible at the top edge.

Realism Geometric Upper arm Lion Eye Big cat Square Branch

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Shift up, you lot, and let the gentleman by the door stop fiddling with his matches. This is Mrs Tennant's back parlour, the winter of the big gale, and a travelling man called Ezra Quill who sold lantern slides from a handcart along the prom. He had one picture he would never sell. A lion's face, taken at a menagerie outside Scarborough, its great eyes looking out as if it knew the photographer still owed it money.

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Ezra's trouble was the damp. Every print he carried grew a bloom by February, so he took his wife's nail scissors and a ruler to the lion, cutting it into squares the size of a ha'penny, one for each stubborn whisker and fold of mane. He laid them on the parlour table in a staircase that stepped down toward the floor, and told the lodgers the beast was only walking out of the picture one square at a time. Some of the tiles he left plain black, where the photograph had gone dark in the sun, and he swore those were the lion's shadow.

In March the sea came up the steps of the terrace one night and took the bottom row clean away. Ezra went looking in the shingle at dawn with a storm lamp and found three squares caught in the wrack, one of them so tarred it was nothing but night. He kept them in a sweet tin and never found the last corner, the one with the lion's ear.

So when you hear the window rattle tonight, don't blame the wind. Mind the fourth stair on your way up, the one with the gap where the tide took a tile, and you'll see the lion's eye looking up at you from the landing, still waiting on what's owed.