Black and grey dotwork lion head tattoo with a triangle outline and chevron lines on a forearm, shown beside its pencil sketch on paper.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lion head with geometric triangle on a forearm

Geometric · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A lion's head with a full, flowing mane and glowing pale eyes fills the centre of the tattoo, with a large triangle above and a stack of chevron lines below. The lion is built from fine linework and dense stippled dots for shading, with the darkest areas filling the lower triangle. A pencil drawing of the same design sits on white paper to the left of the skin.

Geometric Dotwork Forearm Lion Lion head Mane Triangle Chevron Geometric line Sketch Eye

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lamps in the lion's eyes came on at dusk, the way they had every evening since my grandmother was a girl, and I counted the chevrons down the gate as I walked up the causeway with the water still running out of my boots. Eleven stacked lines of iron sat under the triangle of the old wind mast. Nobody on the Harrow Flats had ever explained the triangle. We just took it to mean the road was ours to walk.

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Dust came in from the east that week, the orange kind that smells of hot pennies. Mam sent me up to Vell's yard for a pump washer, and Vell said the lion had gone dim on the Tuesday. Dim meant nobody had left a light for it. The mane was packed with grit, and the stippled dots that Dad called rain on a cheek had filled up until the face looked like a drawing rubbed out with a thumb.

I found the old sketch in the cab of the last rail truck, a paper gone soft as cloth, with the lion drawn in pencil and a circle cut through the triangle. Someone had numbered the chevrons, one for each mile. Eleven miles to the next well. I climbed the gate with a rag and a jar of cold tea and cleaned the eyes one at a time, and when the lamps caught, the whole road lit up pale ahead of me all the way to the well at the edge of the flats.

Walking back, I understood that the lion had never been the thing keeping watch. It only pointed the way to the next light, and somebody had to keep that light burning. Before I slept I carried my own lantern to the window and set it on the sill facing east, where the dust would come from.