Colour neo-traditional tattoo on the thigh of a lion with a flowing mane inside an oval, framed by gold scrollwork with a lion cub above and a banner below.

Lion in an ornate gilded frame on the thigh

Neo-trad · Thigh · Colour · Photo

An adult lion with a flowing mane and a small lion cub at the top are shown within an oval starry, nebula-like background, all enclosed by an ornate gold scrollwork frame. A banner below the oval carries partly legible lettering that reads REMEMBER and WHO YOU. The tattoo uses bold outlines, soft blended shading and rich blues, purples, golds and oranges across the composition.

Neo-trad Thigh Lion Lion cub Mane Frame Scrollwork Banner Lettering Star Nebula

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The sheep were all counted before the storm came in over the headland, and Mother Hesketh counted them again anyway, because she had never trusted a number she had not said aloud. Her son Tobias was on the cliff path with the dog when the sky turned the colour of a bruise and the first hard rain hit the gorse. He came down past the chapel with his coat over his head and found the old lion sitting at the gate of the boarding house, wet to the shoulders, her mane dripping blue light onto the cobbles.

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Nobody in Scarrow Bay had ever seen a lion before, though everybody had heard of one. This one had come up out of the sea three summers back, the fishermen said, walking straight out of the spray with a cub riding on her back like a sailor's parrot. She took the attic room at Hesketh's for a shilling a week and paid in pennies she pulled from her own mouth. She never once went down to the water. She only stared at the stars through the skylight, as though she were reading a letter written in a language she had forgotten.

That night Tobias carried a lamp up the stairs and found her awake, the cub asleep in the crook of her foreleg. She was not looking at the sky. She was looking at the little brass plate she had bolted under the window, which read, in her own careful hand, REMEMBER WHO YOU ARE. He asked her what it meant. She said it was instructions for after the storm, and that the sea gave everything back in the end, provided you asked it plainly.

In the morning the rain had gone and the bay was bright as a plate. The lion was gone, though the attic door stood open to the wind. On the sill lay one long blue-green hair, fine as thread, and the cub's small golden paw print in the salt.