Two people sit side by side with black lion and skull tattoos on their thighs, green sugar skull tattoos below them, and hands clasped between their legs.

Matching lion and sugar skull leg tattoos

Thigh · Mixed · Photo

The photo shows two pairs of legs, each with a large dark tattoo of a lion head and an ornate skull on the thigh. Below these, a green-tinted sugar skull with dark eyes and scrollwork sits on each leg, with handwritten script above one of them. The ink is mostly solid black and grey on the larger pieces, with teal-green shading on the skulls, and the composition is a close crop of the legs and clasped hands against a pale floor.

Thigh Calf Lion Skull Sugar skull Script Hand

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Tamsin,

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You will think I have finally lost my wits, but the lion came back to the beech wood on Tuesday, the same one Father swore he saw the winter before the flood. It stood at the stile with its mane gone the colour of wet bracken and looked straight down the lane, as though it was waiting for the post cart. Mrs Ashby carried bread out to it in a basket and it ate from her hand like a dog. I have decided not to think too hard about that.

Bring the blue tin with you when you come at Michaelmas. The painter who lodged at the Crown left us the skulls before he went, do you remember? Sugar skulls, he called them, the kind they make for the dead in Oaxaca, though he had never been there and admitted as much over his second pint. He painted one on the bakehouse door in teal and green, and the girls copied the scrollwork onto their wrists with the ink Father kept for the parish register. The words he wrote underneath have faded, but I can still read "we keep what we are given" if I squint in the morning light.

The lion returned on the night the bell rang twice without anyone pulling the rope. I walked out past the last oak with the lantern and found it lying on the moss, its great head resting on its paws, and beside it a small skull someone had left on a flat stone, painted fresh, its eyes dark as wet earth. I did not touch it. I left the bread where it lay, carried the skull home in my apron, and set it on the sill beside your last letter, where it grins at me while I write this.