A stylised purple and blue lion head tattoo sits centrally on the upper back of a woman with her blonde hair in an updo.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Purple lion head on upper back

Geometric · Back · Colour · Photo

A stylised lion head faces forwards, with a blue face and a mane built from layered purple and violet shapes. The tattoo uses bold flat fills and angular facial planes with little visible shading, and the subject is framed against a plain grey background. The wearer is photographed from behind, so only the back and the top of the tattoo are shown.

Geometric Neo-trad Back Lion Lion head Mane Animal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ysolde the dye-wife had three days to finish the lion before the river fog came down off the Tarn Hills, and her hands would not stop shaking. Her grandmother had always said the blue came from the cold water under the bridge and the purple from crushed shells the sea left on the wall, but the grandmother was dead and the shells had gone to the gulls.

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The village of Kell had no lion. It had a boy named Tobin who had walked nine days east to bring back a plate of old tin, and in the tin was a face that looked out at the fog and did not blink. The elders said the face was a guard. Put it on the gate, they said, and the fog will sit down outside and wait. So Ysolde mixed the violet from what she could find and painted the mane in layered shapes, each one a little darker than the last, until the whole head looked like an evening with the lamps just lit.

On the third night the fog came and sat at the gate and did not come in. Ysolde slept on the step with a cup of cold tea in her lap. In the morning Tobin asked whether the lion was real. She told him it was as real as the water under the bridge, which is to say it was blue all the way through, and he should stop asking and go and eat his bread.