Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornate lion head design in black and cream

Geometric · Black and grey · Flash

A lion's head faces the viewer, built from dense ornamental linework with patterned scales on the face and a mane of pointed, feather-like shapes. The design uses cream lines and fills on a solid black background, with fine hatching and dotted detail creating depth. The composition is symmetrical and centred, with the head filling most of the frame.

Geometric Lion Mane Ornament Pattern Feather Face

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lion came to me in pieces, a mane of oak shavings on the floor of the Bristol yard and the foreman swearing that the Thessaly's owner wanted something that would frighten the Dutch. I had carved gulls and mermaids for twenty years. Lions I had only seen on the coins Mr Pell kept in his waistcoat.

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I worked him from the front of the block, not the side, because a figurehead that looks sideways is only a dog with ambitions. The mane took me a month. I cut every feather point by hand, then went back with a bent gouge and a flat chisel to pattern the brow, the cheek scales, and the little rings that Mrs Okafor, who sold the ship's bells, said looked like the bosses on a bridle. My sister Ada sat with me in the evenings and counted the dots. There were eleven hundred and four before she gave up.

On the morning the Thessaly sailed, the galley cook came up the quay with a pot of tallow and asked whether the lion would be painted gold. I told him no. Cream and black, the way the oak wanted it. He grunted and said a lion ought to be frightened of nothing. I thought of the gouge slipping on the last morning, the notch I had left in the left ear, and how I had filled it with pale wax and nobody had noticed.

Four months later a letter came from the Cape with no return name. It said only that the lion had kept its face to the weather through a gale off the Horn, and that the cook had carved a second ear on the bowsprit to match, very badly, so that it seemed to listen for us.