Sepia sketch of a lion's head with a flowing mane, drawn as a tattoo design with no body placement shown.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lion head sketch design

Black and grey · Flash

A front-facing lion head with a full, flowing mane, drawn in loose, sketchy brown linework. The eyes, nose and whiskers are defined with darker strokes, while the mane is suggested with long, tapering lines. The drawing is monochrome on a plain white background.

Lion Lion head Mane Whiskers Sketch

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Every Saturday the fiddler tuned up with his back to the door, because that was where the lion sat. Nobody in Hobb's End had seen it come in. It was simply there by the coat pegs when the first reel started, its great head low, its mane spilling over the bench like a wet hayrick.

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Mags Tully danced with it first, the autumn after her husband went to sea. She was not frightened, she said, only tired of men who asked her up and then talked about their feet. The lion did not talk. It rose on its hind legs for the waltz, which the parish council did not discuss, and it turned her so carefully that her boots barely touched the boards.

Through the winter it came and went. The fiddler stopped playing slow tunes because the lion seemed to mind them, and the hall smelled of hay and lamp oil. Then one night the wick guttered and a draught swept in from the lane. The lion's mane lifted, and every dancer saw that the flames were caught in it, a hundred small fires combed through the hair, and the hall went quiet.

Nobody asked it to leave. Mags sat beside it by the stove and worked the tangles out with her fingers until the fire burned low. At dawn the bench was empty, and on the floorboards by the door lay one long amber hair, tapering to a point. Mags kept it in her purse for the rest of her life. When the fiddler asked where the lion had got to, she said it had gone back up to the hills to see about its own dancing.