Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Realistic lion head on a shoulder blade

Realism · Back · Colour · Photo

A lion's head in profile looks upward with its mouth slightly open, shown with detailed fur shading in browns, ochre and black. The lion sits on a soft red and purple wash that fades into the skin, and a partly visible tattoo of red and pink flowers with teal foliage runs along the left edge. The shot is taken close up and slightly from above, focusing on the lion.

Realism Back Lion Lion head Mane Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain had been coming sideways across the market since eight, and by eleven Ruth had stopped pretending the awning would hold. She tipped a bucket off the corner of her trestle and went back to the box at her feet, the one Mr Okafor had dropped off from the Empire's clearance. Brass hinges, a tangle of picture wire, a dozen cracked glass lamp shades. Under them, wrapped in a tea towel that smelled of paraffin, was a lion's head no bigger than a fist.

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It was pitted and green at the mane, but the face had been cast by someone who loved cats more than he feared them. The jaw hung a fraction open. The eyes were set on something above the roofline, past the gutters and the grey smear of the sky, as if it had heard its name called from the far end of a street and was waiting for the rest of the sentence. Ruth turned it over and a screw rolled out of its neck and clicked against the table leg.

A boy in a school blazer stopped at the stall with his mother hurrying him on. He wanted it, he said, because it looked like it was about to shout. Ruth charged him a pound she didn't need and tucked the lion into a paper bag. "Keep it dry," she said. "It doesn't like the wet." He nodded as if she'd given him the rules to a game he already knew how to play.

When the rain finally thinned at four, she found the tea towel still folded on the table, and she thought of the lion's gaze fixed on the thin strip of light beyond the market roof. Whatever it had been waiting for had come. Ruth pulled the awning down, let the water run off it, and for once she did not look up to check the sky.