Black and grey drawing of a lion head with green eyes, framed by scrolling ornamental shapes in a heart outline, shown as a tattoo design with no body placement.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lion head in ornate heart frame

Realism · Black and grey · Flash

A realistic lion's head with a full mane faces forward, with shaded fur and green eyes as the only colour. It sits inside a heart-shaped frame of scrolls, swirls and beaded ornaments, with a pointed flourish at the base. The drawing uses graphite-style shading on a plain white background.

Realism Neo-trad Lion Mane Heart Scrollwork Swirl Ornament

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Hold that ladle still, boy, and stop fidgeting, because a stew stirred by a nervous hand goes sour out of spite. Now. Forty years back, on the Serafina Vell, there was a cook called Osei Tamm who kept a brass lion above the galley hatch. Not a real lion, mind. A tin face the size of a dinner plate, beaten into a heart of curling scrolls, with two green glass eyes the carpenter had set in himself with more care than he ever gave his wife.

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Osei talked to that lion every night while the potatoes boiled. He told it about the price of flour in Montevideo and the bosun's bad teeth. The men thought him soft in the head until the night off the Horn when a sea came over the bow and drove the hatch in. Water poured down the ladder, black as tar, and the galley lamp went out. Osei groped for the rungs and couldn't find them, and then he saw two small green lights above him, steady as a lighthouse, and he hauled himself up after them.

Next morning the carpenter swore the eyes had no lamp behind them, only the moon, and the moon had been hidden under cloud for three days. Osei just shrugged and cut the bread. He never said more about it, except to the lion, which he went on feeding a crust each Sunday until the ship was broken up at Liverpool.

So keep the hatch wiped and the lamp trimmed. And if you ever see green light where there ought to be none, you put down that ladle and go up on deck quick as you like. Now pass the salt, and leave a crust on the sill. Old habits.