Close-up of a black and grey blackwork and dotwork tattoo of a lion's head framed by feathers and leaves on skin.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lion head with feathers in dotwork blackwork

Blackwork · Black and grey · Photo

A lion's head sits at the centre of the design, with a full mane, detailed eyes and a shaded muzzle. Fine linework and dense stippling build the fur, feathers and ornamental panels around it, with solid black areas used for contrast. The ink is black and grey only, and the design fills the frame edge to edge.

Blackwork Dotwork Lion Mane Feather Leaves Ornament

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mairead had counted the feathers twice before the boat came in, and both times there were nine hundred and four, pressed flat into the salt-stiff hide hung behind the chapel on Inish Rua. The gulls had been at the nets again, the old men said, though nobody had seen a gull tear a net open like a sail. Her uncle swore the lion came down from the scrub above the cliffs at the turn of the tide. He swore a lot of things after the second whisky.

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The lion was the chief's, or had been, back when the island had a chief and the chief wore a cloak stitched from every feather the sea gave up. Mairead had seen the cloak once, folded in a chest in the parish office, its ochre leaves gone grey at the edges. Nobody had told her the lion was real. Its face was carved on the lid of the chest, worn to the wood, the eyes sunk so deep the carpenter must have cut them with a nail.

On the third night she sat up with the lamp and a bowl of cold tea, waiting. The wind dropped. Somewhere below the cliff a stone turned over, and then there was a breath, slow and warm, moving across the shed boards like someone reading the tally aloud. Mairead did not go out. She picked up her pencil and wrote a fresh number under the old one, the count of things the island still owed her, and then she crossed it out.

Morning found the hide smooth and the feathers all in their rows. On the doorframe hung a single tawny hair as long as her palm. She pressed it into the ledger between the pages for the year the herring failed, and went down to the quay to tell her uncle he was right, which he would never let her forget.