Realistic lion head with script on upper back

Realism · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A detailed lion head in profile faces right, with a full mane shaded in soft greys and fine strands of linework. Gurmukhi script runs in a curve across the top of the design, and a small patch of colour ink is visible at the edge of the upper arm. The subject is centred on the upper back, with the lion's head and mane filling most of the frame.

Realism Back Lion Mane Script Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ship's cook on the Hestia Rose had a rule about the stove. Nobody touched the bread oven until the lion had been fed, and nobody had ever seen the lion. The old cook, Balwant, said it lived behind the flour sacks, its mane grey as coal smoke, and that it came out only when the sea was rough and the crew were frightened.

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One winter off the Cape the swell got up in the night and the men below began to pray in whatever tongue they had. The boy Tomas, new aboard and sick with fever, crept into the galley because it was the only warm place left. He found the flour sacks shifting. A pale head came out, turned in profile the way a coin is turned, and looked at the stove, not at him.

Balwant had once told him to bring the lion the heel of the morning loaf, so Tomas did, shaking, and set it on the boards. The lion took it in its teeth without touching his fingers, then breathed slowly over the coals until the fire rose blue and steady. When the cook came down at dawn the galley was warm, the bread was baked, and the boy was asleep against the sacks with one hand buried in a mane of soft grey smoke.

The rule stayed on the ship long after Balwant died. In every storm somebody left the heel of the loaf on the flour, and every morning the crust was gone and the stove was warm. Nobody asked the lion for anything else, and it never asked the crew for more than bread.