Line drawing of a lion head with an ornate geometric mane shaded from orange at the top to blue and purple below, shown as a tattoo design with no body part visible.

Ornate lion head with geometric mane

Geometric · Colour · Flash

A front-facing lion head with a detailed mane filled with triangles, zigzags, chevrons and dotted bands. The fine ink linework builds up texture across the fur and mane, with light shading around the eyes and nose. The ink fades from warm red and orange at the top of the mane to cool purple and blue at the bottom, set on a plain pale background.

Geometric Dotwork Lion Lion head Mane Pattern Triangle Zigzag Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The sports hall at Grange Road still smells of floor polish and wet coats, though someone has strung paper lanterns from the basketball hoops and they swing every time the doors open. Ruth from Year Nine has already cornered you by the squash table to ask whether you still have the key. You tell her you have never had the key. She laughs the way she did in 1998, head thrown back, and you notice the crest above the stage is still there, a lion cast in brass, its mane cut into chevrons and dotted bands by a metalwork teacher nobody liked.

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Mr Pryce, who taught you metalwork and was never once known to be kind, sits in a wheelchair beside the urn and watches you cross the room as if he has been expecting you all evening. "You owe me a lion," he says. You remember the night of the leavers' dance, the crest unbolted and carried out through the boiler room, its sharp triangles catching the car park lights. You buried it under the allotment shed, wrapped in a PE mat, and told yourself someone deserving would dig it up one day.

"I know where it is," you say. "Give me until Saturday." He tilts his head the way teachers did when they had decided you were lying and would have to prove it yourself. Outside, the dusk turns the playing field from orange to plum to a deep bruised blue, and the paper lanterns stop swinging as the doors finally close.

On Saturday the frost is thick on the allotment path. The mat has rotted to a brown lace, but the brass comes up streaked green, each zigzag still sharp under your thumb. You carry it back down the lane with the sun climbing behind you, and for once the lion looks like it is going home.