Black and grey lion head tattoo framed by flowers and geometric motifs with teal accents, shaded in dotwork style on the outer thigh.

Lion head and flowers on a thigh

Dotwork · Thigh · Mixed · Photo

A lion's face sits at the centre of the design, with a mane rendered in fine lines and a shaded, stippled face. Large chrysanthemum-like blooms, smaller flowers and a diamond motif frame the lion, with a few flowers and small shapes filled in teal. The image is a close, straight-on photo of the thigh, with grey shorts at the top edge and a patterned teal backdrop behind the leg.

Dotwork Botanical Geometric Thigh Lion Flower Mandala Diamond Mane Geometric pattern

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mirela had been told the lion must look out over the king's gate and not sideways, so she sat on the cold flagstones of the Ormeny workshop with the cartoon pinned to the board and counted the dots she would need for its eyes. Four hundred and twelve for the left, the same for the right, each one a single prick of charcoal on linen. The master had gone to the coast to buy indigo and the apprentices had gone with him, so the workshop belonged to her and the mice.

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On the third evening the lion's face began to look back. Not much. A tilt, as if someone had stepped into a doorway behind her. She set down her needle and told herself the lamp was smoking. The great round chrysanthemums, the heads the court ladies wore pinned at their collars, she left until last, and when she came to the mane she wove it in fine running lines like river reeds. Beneath the chin, where an old crest might have sat, she tucked a small diamond of pale teal.

The king came for the banner at midsummer, his silver rings clicking on the rail. He stood a long while before it. Then he asked who had made the eyes so patient, and Mirela, who had not slept properly in a week, said she had only counted them. He laughed and said the lion had been waiting a long time for someone to look at it properly, and that was the first honest thing a courtier had said to him in years.

The banner hangs over the gate now. On feast days she walks past it and finds the teal flowers faded to the colour of sea glass, and the lion, she is almost certain, has turned his head a fraction towards the workshop window.