Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lion head profile on upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A large lion's head faces left in profile, with a full mane shaded in browns and tans and detailed fur on the muzzle and chin. Behind it, loose painterly washes of green, yellow, orange and red fade into a sunset-like background that frames the head. The image is a close crop of the upper arm and shoulder against a dark backdrop, with the lion placed to the right of centre.

Realism Upper arm Lion Lion head Mane Sunset Profile

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lamp on Scarrow Head had not been lit for three nights when the lion came up the cliff path. Mara Vell heard it before she saw it, a slow breath dragged across the wet rocks. She was eleven, and her father lay in the cottage below with a fever, so the wick was hers to tend. She had decided, by herself, that a light which did not burn was no light at all.

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The lion stopped at the foot of the tower. Its mane was the colour of wet bracken, and it did not look at her. It looked past her, west, where the sun was sinking into the water in bands of red and orange and a green the old people called drowned glass. "You want the sun," she said. The lion said nothing, being a lion, but it sat down and waited, and when she climbed the iron stair to trim the lamp it followed her step for step until the whole tower rang.

The keeper's rule was that the great lens faced the sea so that ships could find the rocks. Mara had always turned it that way. Tonight the lion lay down on the gallery, laid its chin on the rail, and gazed toward the land, where the fishing boats were still out somewhere in the murk. She understood then that the light had been pointed at the wrong thing for years. She swung the lens round until it caught the last of the sun on the inland hills.

By morning the boats had come home by the glow on the fields. Her father found the lamp turned, the wick trimmed, and a single tawny hair caught in the brass. Nobody saw the lion go. On still evenings, when the sun drops into the Atlantic, the cliffs keep a little of its colour, and the fishermen say that the lion still sits up there with its face to the land.