Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornate lion in profile line drawing

Black and grey · Flash

A lion's head faces right in profile, with a long, flowing mane filled with fine flowing strands and geometric patterns. The face and mane are built from dense hatching, stippling and fine parallel lines, with dark areas of ink contrasting against the pale background. The composition fills the frame with the head and mane, with the lion's muzzle and eye placed on the right side of the image.

Lion Mane Profile Ornamental pattern Animal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The flour was still warm from the sack when Dilys pressed the carved lime-wood stamp into the first proving loaf, and the lion came up pale and sharp against the dough. Outside the shutters the lane was still black. Tomasz leaned over her shoulder with a bowl of egg wash, breathing through his nose the way he did when he was about to be right about something.

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'You've cut the mane too fine,' he said. 'Nobody sees the hairs on a loaf.'

'Someone sees them,' she said. Her father had cut that block the winter before he died, working by a paraffin lamp, one notch at a time, each strand of the mane a small chevron meant to catch the light. He had sworn the lion faced east for a reason and never told her what. She had stopped asking the year the ovens were rebuilt and the stamp went into a drawer.

The block split along the grain at the fourth loaf, a hairline crack running from the muzzle back through the chevrons. Tomasz swore. Dilys turned the wood in her hands and found that the crack ran exactly where her father's last strand had been, as though he had meant the lion to have one loose hair. She pressed it down again anyway, and the mark came out with a gap in it, a single pale line drawn through the pattern.

By six the racks were full. The sky over the river had gone the colour of weak tea, and the first light found the loaves on the windowsill, each lion turned towards the glass. Tomasz set the last one down and said nothing, which from him was a kind of agreement. Dilys wiped her hands on her apron and left the shutters open.