Black and grey outline tattoo of Simba's head with the words Hakuna Matata on the top of a foot, shown in ordinary light and under ultraviolet light.

Simba and Hakuna Matata on a foot

Other · Black and grey · Photo

A cartoon lion cub's head, based on Simba, is outlined in black and filled with grey shading, with the words Hakuna Matata in a clean script beside it. The top photo is taken in ordinary light and the lower photo under ultraviolet light, which makes a small patch on the lion's head glow cyan. The tattoo sits centrally on the foot against a plain, slightly textured backdrop.

Other Lion Lion cub Text Uv ink

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Every September the wardrobe in room four came back smelling of the sea, and every September I found the same thing pushed behind the washstand: a torch with rusted batteries and a square of card with a lion cub drawn on it in biro. Nobody ever claimed it. The lodgers came and went along the Parade with their buckets and their sunburn, and after a while I stopped asking whose it was.

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The summer a young woman called Gwen Lacey took the back room, she sat on the step each evening with a pot of fluorescent paint she'd bought from a stall on the pier. She said it was for a friend who wanted something that glowed when the lights went out. "Hakuna matata," she told me, rolling the words round like a pebble. "It means no worries, Mrs Pryce. My dad taught me it on a bus to Torquay." I didn't ask what became of her dad, and she didn't offer.

On her last night she came down to the kitchen with her shoes in one hand, grinning at the kettle, and set the torch on the table between us. She switched off the overhead light and pressed the button, and a single blue smear woke on the cub's brow like a sliver of harbour lamp on wet slate. We sat there in the dark a long while, not saying much, the fridge humming and the sea rolling in under the window.

I kept the card. It lives in the drawer with the spare keys now. Some mornings, when the fog lies thick over the Parade and the boards creak under the empty rooms, I take it out and hold the torch over it, and the little cub comes alight, and I tell myself no worries, and mostly I believe it.