Lion head in profile on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a lion's head facing right in profile, with a long mane that curls and flows outward behind it. The linework and stippled shading are fine and fluid, with soft grey tones across the mane and more detail around the eye and muzzle. The forearm is photographed against a white top and dark trousers in a blurred indoor setting.

Fine line Forearm Lion Lion head Mane

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Brother Wystan, I am sending this with the carter because the abbot has taken the good lamp for his eyes, and I am writing by the last of the window light. The page for Saint Mark is nearly finished but for the lion, and the lion has beaten me.

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Father Cuthbert wants a lion for the saint's beast, proud and set in profile, looking out to the margin as though he has heard a bell. I told him I had never seen one. The dealer who came through with the wool wagon swore he had one caged at Ludlow, but when I went down to look, it had died in the night and the keeper was selling its teeth. So I walked out to the fen edge instead, where the reeds bend all one way under the west wind, and I sat there until my fingers ached.

What I came back with is not what the abbot ordered. The lion faces the right-hand edge as he should, jaw set and eye narrowed, but his mane streams back off his head in long curls, lifted and combed out by the wind the way the reeds were. I laid the hair in fine strokes of lampblack, then stippled the shadows with the smallest nib until the grey rose up soft as breath on a cold pane. It took four days, and I have spoiled two skins.

Cuthbert looked at it for a long while this morning and said nothing, which from him is praise. Then he asked whether the wind would carry the lion off the page. I told him that was the idea. Pray for me, brother, and pray the weather holds until the gold is laid.