Small colour tattoo of a cartoon lion cub with a black outline on the inner wrist and forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small cartoon lion cub on a wrist

Forearm · Colour · Photo

A small tattoo of a cartoon lion cub, shown in a curled, leaping pose, sits on the inner wrist. The design uses a dark outline with flat yellow and orange fills and little visible shading. The background is blurred and shows a purple surface and some indistinct objects.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The paint on the cabin door had blistered off around the little lion's tail, so I sat on the lock beam with a tin of ochre and a brush cut down to three hairs, trying to remember how Dad used to do the curl. He had painted it the summer the boat was still called Marigold Rose and hauled coal up the Trent for a man called Haskett, who paid on the first of the month only when he remembered what month it was.

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Dad always said the cub was jumping for the gate. He'd point his pipe at the top gates of Hallow Lock and say a lion that size only needed a good run and a bit of faith in the water. I thought he was daft. I thought so again the morning he tipped a bucket of river over the bow to wash off the coal dust and laughed at the mess it made on the towpath.

The new paint took slowly. Orange over yellow, then a fine dark line round the curve of the back, the same grey-black Dad used because he said black was for funerals. Sunny from the next boat leaned over the rail with a bag of crisps and asked whether it was a dog. I told her it was a cat that thought it was a dog. She considered that for a long while before nodding.

When the wind swung round I stood up and let the boat take the line. The water ran brown and quick under the gate, and the cub on the door caught the low sun, mid-leap and not afraid of the drop. Dad would have called it ready. I wiped my hands on my jeans and went to see whether the kettle still worked.

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