Black dotwork drawing of a lion head with lilies, paw prints, a dreamcatcher and peacock feathers, shown as a tattoo design on paper.

Lion, lilies and dreamcatcher design

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

A lion's head in profile sits at the upper left, surrounded by lily blooms, paw prints and flowing mane lines. Below and to the right, a dreamcatcher with a web pattern hangs from a loose thread with three peacock feathers. The linework is fine and the shading is built from stippled dots, set against a plain paper background with a slight red tint from the lighting.

Dotwork Lion Lily Paw print Dreamcatcher Peacock feather Flower Mane Web

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The nets come up the slip at first light, heavy with weed and the grey bodies of pollack, and you are picking knots from the mesh when the lion walks out of the fog between the fish boxes. He moves as unhurriedly as a man crossing his own kitchen. Nobody in Porthgarrow keeps a lion. The travelling show left in the autumn with its wagons and a trail of straw down Quay Street, and everyone agreed the animal had gone with it.

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He sits on the wet cobbles and waits, his mane full of lily petals that look as though they fell from somewhere inland. Above the net loft door hangs the dreamcatcher your nan made from willow and cord, its web knotted tight, three peacock feathers trailing from its base like the tails of kites. The lion lifts his head towards it. The old men say that anything the web catches in the night is kept until morning, and that a thing kept too long begins to want its owner back. You climb the ladder, unhook the hoop and hold it out to him, and he breathes against the cord until it sings.

By the time the gulls are working the harbour wall, the cobbles are dry and the lion is gone. There are paw prints on the slip, large and round, stopping at the edge of the water. Caught in the web is a single lily petal, pale as a shell, and a feather with an eye in it, staring out at the boats. You keep the feather. The net you leave on the rail to dry, and it takes a long while before you notice how lightly it hangs, as though something has been carried out of it.