Black and grey realism tattoo of a lion's head with a full mane, covering the upper arm.

Lion head on an upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A large lion's head fills the upper arm, with the eyes, nose and muzzle rendered in fine detail. The mane is built from soft, feathered black and grey shading that fades into the skin at its edges. The photograph is taken close up, with the arm curving across the frame and a blurred background.

Realism Upper arm Lion Lion head Mane Animal Portrait

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The last train to Carlisle had already gone when Dora found the lost dog on platform four, curled under a bench beside a tin of cold chips. She did not want it. Her shift ended at ten and the lost property office closed at nine, so she carried the animal up the iron stairs anyway, past the clock that had stopped at twenty to six sometime during the war, and sat with it under the canopy where the rain came sideways off the Pennines.

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The dog was not a dog. It was a lion's head, mane spread like smoke, and when she turned it toward the lamp she saw it had been drawn in pencil on the back of a timetable, the paper soft as cloth from handling. Someone had shaded the mane with the side of the lead, feathering it so that the edges dissolved into the paper. Dora knew the hand. Her father had drawn exactly that way, for her, every Christmas until the year he stopped coming home by this line.

She waited for the signal to change. It didn't. At quarter past ten a man in a grey overcoat came up the stairs two at a time, looked at the drawing in her lap, and sat down heavily beside her without asking. He said nothing for a long while. Then he said, "He always did hate the rain," and she understood that the lion was his and that he had come a long way to fetch it.

She gave it back. The timetable went into his coat pocket, folded once, and the train he had been waiting for pulled in below them with its lamps lit.