Lion head line drawing in profile

Black and grey · Flash

A lion's head turned to the side, drawn in bold black tapering strokes on white paper. The linework defines the brow, closed eye, nose and jaw with minimal detail, while the mane is suggested by sweeping, pointed flicks of ink. The image is monochrome and open, with plenty of white space around the head.

Lion Mane Head Profile

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You find the stone lion in January, half under a drift at the bottom of Harrow Lane, where the gatepost has tipped and nobody has had the heart to lift it. Ezra Fell carved it the winter his wife left, or so the village says, and he never once smiled at the thing afterwards. Its head is turned to the side, eyes shut, the mane swept back in flicks as if a gale has been over it and given up. You kneel in the slush with a wire brush and a flask of tea, and the frost settles on your gloves.

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Days go by in the usual order. You break the ice on the troughs with a hammer, carry bran out to the ewes, and drive the old tractor up the lane with the chains on. Mrs Ashdown rings from the farmhouse to say the lamb in the back barn has taken a bottle, and you go over with your coat unbuttoned because the stove in there has been out since Tuesday. Nobody on the farm talks much in winter. The work does the talking, and the lion, when you pass it, keeps its own counsel.

So one evening, with the light going blue over the stubble, you tell it things. You say the lamb is up and bleating, that the hedge is down by the lower field, that Ezra's dog has been seen again at the church gate. The lion does not open its eyes. You had not expected it to. But when you come back down the lane in the morning, there is a crocus pushed up through the snow beside its forepaw, purple and absurd, and the wind is combing the mane backwards as if the whole stone head were finally drawing breath.