Large black and grey lion head tattoo with a flowing, patterned mane covering the upper and middle back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lion head tattoo across a back

Blackwork · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A large lion head faces right across the back, with its mane drawn as flowing, feather-like sections filled with fine hatched and wavy lines. The head has ornamental detailing on its brow and cheek, and the shading builds depth through layered black linework and grey tones. The composition fills most of the back, with the skin around it lightly out of focus.

Blackwork Neo-trad Back Lion Mane Lion head Feather Ornament

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dilys had the second batch of rye in the proving drawer before the milk float rattled past the end of Harrow Street, and she was halfway through scoring the first tin loaf when the back door bolt slid of its own accord. Nobody came in before four except the flour man, and he always knocked twice and swore at the step. This time there was only a slow scrape, then the soft thud of something heavy landing on the lino.

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It was a tom, scarred across one ear and thick through the shoulders, and it stood beside the sack trolley as if it held the lease on the place. Its ruff rose in long, layered tiers, each ridge lapping the one below like the leaves of a cabbage, and where the oven light caught it the grey fur looked ploughed into furrows. Dilys had seen plenty of cats on Harrow Street. None had ever looked at her the way this one did, as though she were the one who had wandered in.

She tore the heel off yesterday's split tin and set it on a saucer. While the cat ate, she worked the dough for the Cornish buns, and each time she glanced over, the animal was watching her hands rather than the bread. When flour settled on its mane it did not shake it off. It sat there like frost on a gate, and she found herself humming the hymn her mother used to hum over the sifter.

At quarter to five the paper lad banged on the front shutter and called through the letterbox that there was a lion in the back yard. Dilys told him it was a tom, belonging to nobody, same as her and the rest of Harrow Street. She went back to the tins. When she next looked up, the window over the gasworks had turned the colour of skimmed milk, and the gap under the yard gate was empty, with a faint dust of flour on the step where the ruff had brushed past.