Black and grey realism tattoo of a lion's head inside an ornate scrolled heart frame, centred on the upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lion head in an ornate heart on upper back

Realism · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A lion's head faces forward, with its mane shaded in dense black and grey strokes and its eyes and nose rendered in fine detail. The lion sits inside a heart-shaped frame of flourishing scrolls and filigree outlined in thin black lines, with a small point at the base. The image is a close, front-on photograph of the upper back, with the tattoo filling most of the frame against soft, out-of-focus surroundings.

Realism Back Lion Lion head Mane Heart Filigree Scroll Ornament

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The frame was finished a week before the lion arrived, which Tobias Wren considered the only sensible order of things. He had spent eleven evenings on the scrolls alone, chasing each filigree leaf with a graver no thicker than an eyelash, while the workshop above the Clerkenwell tannery filled with the smell of hot solder and oiled wool.

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Mrs Holloway brought the portrait herself on a Tuesday, wrapped in brown paper and tied with twine. The lion inside was old, painted from life in the yard behind the Gilt Lantern theatre the summer before the beast went blind. She unwrapped it on his bench and said the heart had to be right, because Ansel had never fitted anything he was given and she would not have him sulk.

Tobias measured twice and found the trouble at once. The mane in the painting ran past the edges of the shape he had drawn, wild and dark as spilt ink, and no sensible frame would hold it. He could have trimmed the portrait or trimmed the lion. Instead he took his scribe to the heart's lower point and opened the curve outward by the width of a thumb, so the scrolls would bow and the black hair could come through them.

When Ansel's portrait went back into its frame that evening, the lion looked out at the room with the fringe of his mane pressing gently against the silver, as if the heart had been made around him and not the other way about. Mrs Holloway ran a thumb along the outer curl and paid in full without asking for a discount.