Realistic lion head on an upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A detailed lion head in profile, looking to the left, with a full mane that fades into the skin at its edges. The fur, whiskers and eye are rendered with soft, fine shading and smooth tonal gradients. The tattoo is entirely black and grey and fills most of the frame, with part of a darker mark visible at the far left edge.

Realism Upper arm Lion Mane Whiskers Big cat Portrait

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody on Scarrow Quay agreed about much, but they all agreed the lion on the Patience Hale was looking the wrong way. My uncle Tom had it carved into the bow in the spring of 1978, a head in profile turned to port, so that every morning as we slid off the wall it watched the town fall away behind us.

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The carver came over from the far side of the bay with a canvas bag of gouges and a jar of cold tea, and he worked a fortnight in the fish store with the doors propped open. He gave the mane long strokes like kelp in a current and cut the whiskers so fine they caught the light. Tom wanted the eye to look hard at something, so the carver darkened the brow until it seemed to squint into weather.

I took the wheel my first winter, sixteen and full of myself, and asked Tom why we couldn't have a lion that faced forward and showed us where we were going. He was mending a net and didn't look up. A boat should know what it's leaving, he said, and the lion is the one who remembers. I took it for a joke until the night the fog came down so thick we couldn't see our own bow. Tom put his hand on my shoulder and steered us home by the line of that carved nose, and the breakwater light came up exactly where the lion had been pointing all along.

The Hale is broken up now. Her bow hangs on a hook in the net loft, grey where the paint has worn to bare wood. Last month I took a brush to the lion's eye, out of habit more than sense, and it still looks back at the harbour as if it has forgotten nothing.