Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lion head with swirling mane

Black and grey · Flash

A lion head faces right in profile, with its eye, nose and mouth drawn in simple, clean outlines. The mane is built from many looping, curling scrolls that fill the space around the head and taper into long spirals at the bottom. The image is rendered in uniform black linework on a white background, with no shading or colour.

Lion Mane Swirl Scroll Spiral

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The gate had to be on the cart by eleven, so we loaded it in the rain under the sodium lamp, Dev holding the torch and me swearing at the hinge pins. Gerald had drawn the lion himself on squared paper, a head turned to the right, its mane coming off it in loops and curls that Dev said looked like smoke someone had tried to tie in knots. We'd spent three weeks bending those scrolls cold, one curl at a time, and I still had the blisters to prove it.

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The lion was meant to face the terrace across the road, where Mrs Pryce had her front door painted green and kept a dish of sugared almonds on the sill for the postman. But when we hauled the panel up and swung it into the frame, the snout pointed the other way, down the towpath toward the lock. Dev wanted to take it back down and fix it. I said the customer had signed off the drawing, and the drawing was the drawing, and it was past midnight, and nobody in their right mind was going to argue with a gate.

At the lock the water was black and still, with the streetlights stacked in it like coins at the bottom of a fountain. I walked back along the towpath on my own and stood there a while, looking at the iron through the railings. The curls had caught the light from the bridge, and the lion's eye was fixed on the water where the lock gates would open if anyone was foolish enough to let them.

I went back to the yard after and found Gerald's sketch pinned under the vice. On the back, in soft pencil, he'd written: she looks where the water goes. I didn't tell Dev. I just picked up the file and went back to work on the next curl.