Black linework lion head wearing a feathered headdress tattooed on the ankle, beside a photo of a seated person in a floral dress with a small tattoo on the ankle.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lion in feathered headdress on ankle

Traditional · Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

The left panel is a close view of a lion's head wearing a feathered headdress with a banded, patterned band across the forehead, drawn in black linework with dense hatching in the mane. The right panel shows a seated person in a floral dress with a small darker tattoo on the ankle, with the face outside the frame. The image is a diptych in black ink and skin tones, with a plain light background on the right.

Traditional Ankle Lion Headdress Feather Geometric pattern

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Ruth,

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The lion has taken to the headdress, so don't laugh when I tell you. Sol carried it up from the wharf in a flour sack, and the moment he set it on the beast at Cropredy lock, the great cat went still as a chapel pew and let the children walk round him three times. Eleven feathers, I counted, and one bent where the band pinches. The band is the best part. Someone stitched diamonds and little wheels into the cloth, and the thread has gone the colour of stewed tea.

The fair people say he came out of a travelling show that folded at Market Harborough, its trunks left at the Bell with nobody to pay the bill. Father reckons a lion needs no telling what he is. He only needs something to stop him staring at the water, and a crown gives him a job, same as the rest of us. He walks the towpath at dawn with the feathers swinging behind him, and the coal boatmen tip their caps to him as if he were the lock keeper.

Tonight we tie up under the willows. I'll sit with him on the roof hatch the way I used to sit with Mother, while the cuckoo goes on about the weather. When the wind comes off the cut he lifts his chin, and all those feathers rise together, slow as a congregation remembering the hymn. Come up in the spring if the roads are dry. Bring the good awl, the one for leather, and we'll see about that band.