Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lion head in profile on the ribs

Blackwork · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A lion head faces left in profile, with a full mane drawn in heavy outlines, loose hatching and solid black fills. The linework is bold and slightly sketchy, with dense black areas giving depth to the mane and shadow. The tattoo sits on bare skin along the side of the torso, with a light fabric edge at the top left of the frame.

Blackwork Ribs Lion Lion head Mane Animal Profile

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lion came down from the hill the week the river froze, and nobody in Harrowmere could agree on whether it was a sign or a sheep problem. Old Teodor Vance wanted it shot. His granddaughter Ada, who was nine and had read every book in the rectory, wanted to leave out a bucket of salt fish and see what happened.

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She went up to the edge of the birches at dusk with the bucket and a lantern that smelt of paraffin. The lion was lying in the bracken with its great head turned towards the village, the mane dark and heavy with wet, as if it had been combed by the rain. It did not look at the bucket. It looked at her, slowly, the way the church clock looks at the square, and then it looked away at the lights coming on below.

She left the fish and went home. In the morning the bucket was empty and the bracken was flattened in a long circle, and on the frost of the lych-gate someone had scratched a line of shaggy hatching, very deep, like a man pressing too hard with a nail. Teodor saw it first and went quiet for the first time in forty years.

The lion was never seen again, though the village kept its gate shut at night for a long while after. Ada grew up and became a bell-ringer, and when people asked why she always kept a little salt in her pocket, she told them it was for the wind, which was true enough.