Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lion head in profile line drawing

Black and grey · Flash

A lion's head in profile, facing left, with closed eyes and a softly defined muzzle. The mane is drawn as sweeping black strokes that swell and taper around the head. The design uses bold, simple linework in solid black on a plain white background, with no shading or colour.

Lion Lion head Mane Profile

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Every spring the boats came back from the northern banks with less in their nets, and the old men on Hallow Skerry said it was because the lion was sleeping again. Nobody on the island had seen him. His mane lay across the high moor like a black tide gone still, and when the wind moved through it the gorse hissed and bent.

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Marin Teague was nine the year she decided to wake him. Her grandmother had told her that a sleeping lion must not be shouted at, nor touched, nor looked at straight on. So Marin walked up the moor in her brother's boots with a pail of salt herring and a loaf wrapped in oilcloth, and she sat down at the edge of the mane where its strokes swept out into the heather. She talked to him about the weather and about her cat and about the price of wool in Stromness, which was a thing she had heard her father complain of. She did not look at his face.

He opened his eyes at dusk. They were slow and amber and not unkind. "You have talked a long time for a girl who was afraid of me," he said.

"I wasn't afraid," said Marin. "I was waiting for you to be ready to listen." The lion looked at the pail, then at her, and his mouth moved as if he were smiling at something a long way off. "Then listen. The sea does not need my sleep. It needs someone to keep the boats honest."

Marin went down to the harbour the next morning and found the nets heavy with silver. Her father asked where she had got the sense to know the tides. She only said she had been out late with a friend who took his rest on the moor, and that he had good manners when the herring were salted. Every March after, the boats came home full, and if you climbed to the top of the moor at dusk you could see a long black mane lying across the heather, rising and falling as if it breathed with the sea.