Close-up of a small black and grey realism lion head tattoo on a woman's middle finger, with a diamond ring on the adjacent finger and red nail polish.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lion head tattoo on a finger

Realism · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A small lion's head is tattooed on the side of a finger, with a detailed mane, eyes and nose rendered in fine shading. The linework and soft grey tonal shading give the lion a realistic, portrait-like appearance. The background is a plain deep red, and the hand wears a sparkling ring and a black lace-trimmed sleeve, with the tattoo as the clear focal point.

Realism Hand Lion Lion head Mane

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The brass lion lived in a tin on our kitchen windowsill for thirty years, and nobody was allowed to touch it except Mam on a Sunday. It came from the Whitwood colliery band, a fob no bigger than a thumbnail, its mane cut so fine you had to pull the lamp right down to see the separate hairs.

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Nell came round the week before her wedding with her finger held out flat on the oilcloth, as if it belonged to someone else. She wanted the lion on the side of that finger, where the ring would sit, and she wanted it to look as though it had always been there. I had no needle, only a pencil, a sheet of brown paper from the chippy and the fob itself. I drew until the paper went soft at the folds, rubbing the grey into the cheeks with my thumb so it came out smudged like soot on a collar.

Halfway through she asked why the lion looked so tired. I told her it had been pawned in the winter of 1926, when the stoppage ran so long that Grandad Albert walked to Leeds and back to sell his boots, and that Mam bought it back in 1938 with two years of savings from the Co-op. Since then it had sat on that sill watching the back lane, as if it expected someone to come up it with a pail.

Nell held her hand under the lamp and turned it slowly. The drawn eyes caught the light the way the fob's had, two pinpricks of silver in the grey. She pressed her finger to the paper, lion facing her palm, and said it could keep watch over her now instead of the lane.