Lion profile with Leo banner and starry sky

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

A lion's head faces left in profile, its mane drawn with dense, flowing hatched strokes. Behind it sits a circular panel of stars, a planet, a crescent moon and a constellation, with a banner reading LEO above and daisy-like flowers and clouds below. The linework is fine and detailed, with stippled dotwork in the clouds and background, and the design is entirely black ink on white.

Dotwork Botanical Lion Banner Star Constellation Planet Moon Flower Cloud Sun

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Late in the summer, when the apples were heavy enough to bow the boughs, the lion came down out of the sky to see about the orchard. Nobody in Ashcombe had seen a lion before, though the old men said one had once been spotted on the hill above the mill, and that it had walked backwards so its tracks pointed the wrong way.

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He was stiff from lying so long on the dark, and he had nothing to eat but the small white flowers that grew in the clouds. Each night he climbed down the ladder of the Plough, stepped over the wall and walked among the trees, looking up at the fruit with his great grey eyes. Mabel Orr, who kept the orchard for her brother, woke one night to find him standing in the grass with dew on his mane. She did not run. She asked him whether he was hungry, and he said he was, but not for apples.

What he wanted was the moon. Years before, while trying to drink, he had knocked it from the sky, and it had sunk into the orchard pond and gone out. Mabel said that was a shame, and that the pond was hers, and that she would help him look if he helped her pick the early Bramleys. So they worked through the nights. He carried baskets in his teeth and she climbed the ladders and lowered the fruit down to him. At dawn they went to the pond and dug with their hands until a cold silver shape came up through the mud.

He hung it back above the hill, where it belonged, and shook the water from his mane. In return he laid a thread of starlight across the pond, a line of small lights she could follow home. The lion went back up the ladder of the Plough and did not come down again, though some autumns Mabel says she sees him on clear nights, lying on his side with his face turned towards the orchard. The apples keep better in the cold.