Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornate lion head on upper arm

Blackwork · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A lion's head in right-facing profile fills the upper arm, with a flowing mane of fine lines and geometric, mandala-like panels. The face and muzzle are shaded with dense dotwork, contrasting with the linework in the mane. The image is monochrome black and grey, shot close up against a dark background with the edge of the shoulder visible.

Blackwork Dotwork Upper arm Lion Lion head Mane Mandala Geometric pattern

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The tide had already turned when the boy from the ropeworks came staggering up Salt Lane with the lion under his arm. Its face had split along the grain, a clean crack from brow to jaw, and its mane, once gilded, had gone the colour of wet slate. Nobody else in Porthrey would touch it. You wiped your hands on your apron, unrolled your chisels on the bench by the window, and told him to set the thing down where the light came in sideways off the harbour.

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For nine evenings you worked on the mane alone. You did not carve it so much as coax it, following the grain in long strokes, then stopping to cut the small panels the old carver had sunk into the hair like lit windows: a half moon, a chevron, an eight-pointed star you measured twice with brass dividers borrowed from the chandler. The muzzle was harder. He had pocked it with a thousand tiny hollows, each one deliberate, and by the third night your eyes ached from counting them and your thumb was raw from the mallet.

On the tenth morning the boy returned. He asked what he owed, and when you said nothing he looked at you as though you had mistaken him for someone else. He hoisted the lion onto his shoulder and carried it down to the quay, where the Marguerite was loading for the morning ebb. You followed as far as the bollards and watched them fix it to her bow, face turned out to sea the way the old carver had always intended.

From the quay, if you knew where to look, you could still pick out the hollows you had cut yourself, catching the low sun like a row of small, stubborn stars.