Realism tattoo of a lion wearing a feathered headdress, with blue eyes and red face paint, on the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lion in feathered headdress on forearm

Realism · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A lion's head wearing a feathered headdress is tattooed on the forearm, with feathers and leaf-like shapes fanning out behind it against a black background. The face is shaded in soft greys with fine fur detail, while the eyes are bright blue and the face paint is red and yellow. Colour accents are limited to the eyes and face markings, and the rest of the design is black and grey.

Realism Forearm Lion Headdress Feather Face paint Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lioness came up the cliff path the week the Skerry Head light was switched to automatic, and nobody in Porthcray knew what to do with her. Mrs Anstey at the post office said she belonged in a zoo. Her husband said the sea had brought her, which was nonsense, because nothing comes ashore on that coast without a boat. I had kept the lamp for thirty-one years, and I said nothing. She walked straight past me to the iron door at the foot of the tower and sat down in front of it as if she had been expected.

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She wore a headdress the way a bishop wears a mitre, stiff and deliberate, built from every gull and gannet feather she had gathered off the rocks over one moulting season. Sycamore leaves from the lane were pinned among them with fishing line. Red and yellow ochre from the clay bank by the slipway striped her cheeks and chin. When I asked what she wanted, she looked up at the gallery where the great lens turned and said nothing. Lions are patient. So, it turned out, was I.

On the last night the fog came in thick enough to hide the cliff edge, and the new beacon blinked its dim red warning to nobody. I heard the fishing boats out past the Mare before I saw them, engines throttled back and voices calling to each other in the murk. I climbed the stairs with my knees complaining. She was already on the gallery, feathers lifting in the damp, her blue eyes fixed on the dark lens as if she could read it. I wound the old clockwork by hand and lit the paraffin, and she leaned against my leg.

The beam swept out across the water and bent through the feathers and the leaves she had pinned into them. The trawlers turned for the harbour mouth one by one, and by the time the fog thinned she had gone back down the path into the bracken. Mrs Anstey still says she was a sign. I tell her she was a lioness who knew where the stairs were, which is the only kind of sign I trust.