Close view of a bold black lion silhouette tattoo with a flowing mane on a forearm, in a blackwork style, with a second part of the design on the adjoining arm.

Lion silhouette on a forearm

Blackwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a solid black lion walking forward with a mane that breaks into ragged, feathered edges. The design is built from flat black fill with small areas of skin showing through as highlights, giving a stencil-like silhouette rather than detailed shading. It is shown in black ink only on two arms placed side by side, with the lion continuing across to the second arm, and the skin tones and dark background frame the design.

Blackwork Forearm Lion Mane Silhouette Big cat

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lion came down from the hills the winter the river froze solid, and nobody in Harrowmere agreed on what he wanted. The miller said he wanted the sheep. The priest said he wanted the bells melted down. Old Ysolde, who kept the bakehouse at the bottom of Gallow Lane, said he only wanted to be seen walking, because a lion that is not seen is only a rumour, and rumours are cheap to carry.

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He walked into the market square at dusk with his mane gone ragged from the frost, the feathered edges of it breaking up like smoke against the sky. The children ran. The dogs did not bark. Ysolde set a loaf on the cobbles at the edge of the square, the way her mother had done for strangers, and went back inside to bolt the door.

In the morning the loaf was gone and there were paw marks in the frost leading east, away from the mill and the church and the sheep. Between the prints, where the frost had thinned, someone had pressed a single hand. It was not a child's hand, and it was not a man's either. The miller swore it had the long fingers of a woman who had spent her life carrying things up a hill, and that the hand had been pointing the way the lion had gone.

Nobody followed the tracks. They say the lion is still walking east, and that the river has not frozen since.