Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornate lion in profile

Blackwork · Black and grey · Flash

A lion is drawn in profile facing right, with its face rendered in fine stippled shading and its mane filled with dense, decorative patterns of lines, dots and zigzag motifs. The linework is detailed and symmetrical in places, with the mane patterns becoming more open towards the bottom edge. The image is entirely black ink on a white background, with no colour.

Blackwork Dotwork Lion Mane Profile Big cat Ornamental pattern

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

They had not expected the lion at the reunion. Forty-one of them had left Hollin Primary in the same summer, and the hall had been booked for thirty, so he was an inconvenience before anyone thought to call him a guest. He came in sideways through the fire door, the way a cat comes through a gap it has already decided on, and stood by the urn with his head turned to the window as if he were waiting for a bus cancelled long ago.

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His mane was covered in patterns. Each zigzag was a road, Mrs Pryor said, because she had taught them all long division and knew a route when she saw one, and each ring of dots was a place he had slept. Nobody thought to ask him to sit. Dennis from the pub brought him a bowl of water, and the lion drank without looking down, the way a man reads a letter he already knows by heart. When Mrs Pryor asked whether he had come a long way, he said the distance was in his hair, and turned his head so she could see the knots.

At nine they called the register, because the old teacher insisted, and each name met a silence. When they reached Tommy Ashe the lion lifted his head, and the whole hall heard the river. Nobody had told him about Tommy. He had found the name in the dense part of his mane, where the lines curled back on themselves, and he made a small mark there with his tongue, which was not a thing a lion should be able to do, and nobody argued.

He left before the caretaker locked up. In the morning the urn was cold and the hall was empty, but the fire door stood open a finger's width. On the flagstone outside someone had found a single black hair curled like a question mark, with a dot pressed into its end, and they all agreed afterwards that it was a fair answer.