Black and grey blackwork and dotwork tattoo of a lion head framed by a geometric diamond and a sigil, on the outer forearm.

Lion head and geometric sigil on a forearm

Blackwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A lion's head fills the forearm, with a full mane shaded in solid black and a muzzle built from fine stippled dots. Above it sits a diamond-shaped frame containing an angular sigil of interlocking strokes, and a second geometric panel with a snarling mouth lies below the lion. The work is entirely black and grey, with strong contrast between dense black fills and light grey dotted areas against a plain pale background.

Blackwork Dotwork Geometric Forearm Lion Lion head Mane Diamond Geometric frame

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The wall of the Lantern House was cold against Brannoch's back when the bell began to ring the wrong number of times. Three strokes, then a pause, then three more. Old Merrit, who had kept the bell for forty winters, said that meant the lamp-oil cart had overturned on the causeway again, and that the mayor would want the sigil brought down from the gate before anyone thought to bring the oil.

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The sigil was a diamond of black iron bolted above the north gate, its strokes so tangled that children were told they were a map of the old river and adults said nothing. Brannoch had been told to climb up and take it down for cleaning. He did not ask why a thing that had hung there for two hundred years needed cleaning in the middle of a flood. He only found, when he reached it, that the strokes were not iron at all but a lattice of cut stone, and that behind the lattice something was breathing in long, patient draughts.

He came down without the sigil. Below the gate the great stone lion that guarded the causeway had turned its head toward the town, and its jaws, which had been shut since the Founding, hung open the width of a man's arm. Merrit was already at the bottom of the ladder with the lamp. "Well," she said, looking up at the empty frame. "You've let it out, then."

Brannoch looked at the mane of the lion, black and combed in long shadows, and at the fine grey stippling of its muzzle, which seemed, in the lamplight, to be counting the houses one by one. "Where does it go?" he asked. Merrit shrugged and lit the next lamp. "Wherever the oil was going," she said. "It's always hungry for the things we forget to carry.