Watercolour-style lion head linked by thin geometric circles and lines, with red and green splashes, on an upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lion head with geometric circles on upper arm

Geometric · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A lion's head in profile sits on the upper arm, with its face softly shaded in grey and black. Thin black lines and open circles form a geometric structure that runs over and around the head and down the arm. Loose red and green washes spread behind the lion, giving a painterly, splashed finish.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The last chain of the survey ran out at the edge of Hollin Wood, three yards short of the stile. Nell Ashby pegged it anyway, because her father had always pegged to the end of a line, and a line that stopped short was a lie told to the parish. Behind her the village of Cressley was already lighting its kitchen windows, one by one, like someone counting out coins.

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Her father's ledger had a drawing in the back: a lion's head in profile, shaded in pencil until it looked more like weather than fur, with a ring of open circles drawn over it and joined by hair-thin lines. Under the drawing he had written only bearings. Nell had spent a winter failing to make the bearings meet. Every line she laid from the circles ended in the same place, a gap between two oaks where the wood thinned and the red clay showed through like a split in a hedge.

On the last evening she walked the lines by lantern. The circles were not circles on the ground, only marks where old boundary stones had sunk into the moss, each sitting in its own small hollow. She stood in the gap between the oaks while the sunset ran red and green over the bracken, exactly as her father had washed it in, and she understood he had never been mapping land at all. He had been mapping the way the lion turned its head to look back at the village.

She moved the peg four yards into the wood, past the stile and past the stones, and drove it into the clay. Then she went home, wrote the bearing in the ledger beneath his in her own square hand, and left the lion looking out over the meadows where it could watch the lights come on.

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