Fine-line lion head with a flowing mane on the upper back, in pale lines against tanned skin.

Lion head on upper back

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A lion's head faces forward, with a flowing mane drawn as radiating lines around the face and eyes. The linework is fine and even, and the ink appears pale or white against the skin, with no shading. The design fills the centre of a bare upper back, with a black top and a car visible at the edge of the frame.

Fine line Back Lion Mane Animal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lion had come out of the Portland block with its jaw set too far forward, and Harold Pike spent three nights at the bench before he would let the bank clerk see it. Mr Brand wanted something to sit above the door of the new Co-operative in Hebden Crossing, something the town could point to on a Saturday. Harold did not want anything pointed at. He wanted the mane right.

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He cut it the way his father had taught him to cut the numerals on a sundial, each line running out from the centre at its own true angle, fine enough that one slipped chisel would cost him a week. The eyes took longest. Stone eyes look dead from the pavement unless the brow is lifted a hair, so he lifted it, then lowered it, then lifted it again, until the thing seemed to watch the traffic as if it had been posted there to keep an eye on it.

On the morning they hoisted it up, the frost was thick on the cobbles and a girl from the chip shop stopped with her paper parcel steaming in her hands and tipped her head back. Brand asked her what she made of it. She said the lion looked as if someone had drawn it on the cold window with a fingernail, every line thin and white, and she would tell her mother it was a good one.

Harold said nothing. He had not drawn anything in the frost. He had only cut it in stone, and it was her eyes that had found the frost in it. He walked home by the long way, past the chapel and the wet railings, thinking that was the only praise worth carrying.