Black and grey realism lion face tattoo with a shaded mane across the side of a clenched hand, with gold rings on the fingers.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lion face tattoo on a clenched hand

Realism · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a clenched fist showing a lion's face tattooed on the side of the hand, with its mane shaded in dark grey and black. The fur and eyes are rendered with soft shading and fine detail, and the lion faces the viewer. Gold rings and red nail polish are visible against a dark background.

Realism Hand Lion Mane Hand

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nurse Agnes Peel had worked the night ward at Hollin Cross for eleven winters, and she knew the old lion lived under the back stairs because the coal scuttle was always found pushed to one side in the mornings. Nobody else believed it. The porters said rats. The matron said nothing at all, which in Agnes's experience meant she had seen him too.

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On the night the snow shut the lane, a boy was carried in with a split leg and a fever that made him sing. He was ten, and his mother had walked three miles to reach them. Agnes sat with him while the doctor was stuck on the far side of the moor. The lamp guttered. She heard a slow breath on the stairs, a sound like a big dog settling, and the boy stopped singing and looked past her shoulder with his eyes wide and calm.

Agnes did not turn round. Her grandmother had taught her that a lion only comes when the watch is kept honestly. She kept one hand flat on the blanket and held the boy's wrist, counting the beats the way she had been taught, and she spoke to the dark as if it were an old friend who had missed the last shift.

By dawn the fever had broken. The doctor came in red-faced with cold and found the coal scuttle pushed to one side, a tuft of tawny hair caught on the banister, and the night nurse asleep upright in her chair with her hand still closed around the boy's wrist. Agnes swore afterwards she dreamed of nothing. Still, she always left the stair door open a crack after that, and never once let the lamp go out.