Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lion head in profile with feathers

Fine line · Mixed · Flash

A lion's head faces left in profile, with a long, wavy mane drawn in many thin brown lines. Two feathers hang from the mane, one filled with pale teal and rust, the other outlined in fine grey lines. The linework is dense in the mane and sparse across the face, and the plain cream background keeps the composition clean.

Fine line Lion Mane Feather Profile Lion head

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Shift your chair nearer the range, Ellen, the cold creeps under the back door whatever your mother says about the draught excluder. That was the winter the snow sat on the top field for six weeks and the ewes went down in the drifts. Old Maurice Hollins was up at four every morning with a shovel and a dog that wouldn't come in, and that's when the lion came down off the fell.

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Nobody believed Maurice at first. He said the animal walked with its head high, like it owned the weather, and its mane was so thick with frost you could have hung a coat on it. Two feathers hung from the mane, one blue-green like the sea under ice, the other rust at the tip, and a smaller grey one that had snagged loose and trailed behind. Maurice didn't go near. He stood in the gateway with the lantern and the lion stood in the snow, and they looked at each other for the length of a hymn.

Here's the part your grandfather never liked telling. The lion didn't want a lamb. It wanted the grey feather back, which Maurice had found the week before caught on the barbed wire and had nailed to the barn beam to keep the rats off his seed corn. Maurice fetched it down. He laid it in the snow between them and stepped back, and the lion bent its great head, took the quill gently in its teeth, and climbed back up the fell without a sound.

And the ewes? Every one of them lived to see spring. Maurice swore the drifts shifted aside that night, and I believe him, because by morning the path to the top field was clear as a plate. Now off to bed, and mind the stair, it's the fourth one that creaks.