Lion face with tan fur and orange eyes set within a grey dotwork mandala, tattooed on the outer thigh.

Lion within a mandala on a thigh

Dotwork · Thigh · Mixed · Photo

A lion's face sits at the centre of a circular mandala, with leaf-like ornaments at its upper edges. The mandala is built from layered geometric petals shaded with fine dots and stippled grey, while the lion's fur and muzzle use flat tan and cream tones. The design is centred on the outer thigh and is photographed against a pink patterned fabric.

Dotwork Geometric Thigh Lion Mandala Leaves Geometric pattern

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody had asked for the lioness in the middle of the rose window, least of all the Dean, who wanted the old saints back. Hannah Pryce found her on the fourth morning of cleaning, when the sun came over the cloister wall and lit one pane the colour of weak tea. Under the grime was a face built from hundreds of tiny dots, laid like sand through a sieve, and around it a ring of petals so exact she had to lie flat on the scaffold boards to see where one ended and the next began.

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She spent a week copying the petals onto squared paper before she touched any lead. The glazier who had set her in 1889 was a man called Tobias Wren, dismissed that same year for refusing to replace her with a lamb. His ledger was still in the vestry, and on its last page, in the margin, he had written in a cramped hand that a lion keeps the light in and the weather out. Hannah thought it was nonsense until a February gale tore open the north transept and the only pane left whole in the whole building was hers.

She lifted the broken glass out one piece at a time, matched each dot with a sliver of new glass, and fired the leads in the cold yard behind the chapter house. The rust-red eyes were the hardest. Tobias had used a flaw in the batch to get them, and no supplier in England could sell her the same flaw twice, so she bought three sheets of ordinary red and ground them down until they looked wrong in the right way.

On the first still afternoon after the glazing, the Dean stood under the window with his hands behind his back and said the saints would look better. Hannah said nothing. The sun came through the centre at that moment and the lioness looked straight down the nave at him, unhurried, as if she had been waiting for him to finish talking.