Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Stylised lion head in profile with curled tail

Black and grey · Flash

A stylised lion or big cat head faces right in profile, with its mouth open and a swept, spiky mane drawn as tapering strokes. A long tail rises from the left and ends in a tight spiral. The design uses sweeping black linework with no shading or fill, set against a plain white background.

Lion Big cat Mane Tail Profile Spiral

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody aboard the Saint Brannock trusted the galley stove in a following sea, so I kept my pans lashed and my stock pot wedged between two sacks of barley. The lads called me Pepper because I sneezed over the spice locker every morning. Above the hatch hung the old lion from the bow, unbolted in Lisbon and nailed up by the carpenter to stop the crew pinching biscuits. Its jaw stood open in a roar, and its mane swept back in long tapering spikes, as if the wind had been combing it for a century.

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We met the swell off Ushant in the black hour before dawn, and the ship lay over so far that my ladle skated across the deck. A flour sack split, and Tobias Renn came down the companionway bellowing for hot soup, because soup was all that kept the watch from quitting. I had no stock left, only a cracked tureen and a stub of candle. So I hung the kettle from the spiral of the lion's tail, the way the old cooks did, and got the fire going.

By the time grey light came through the port, the soup had gone round twice. Renn held his bowl and said nothing, which from him was thanks. He had been lashed to the mast the night the lion broke its moorings in Lisbon, and I had never asked him how it happened.

Later I scraped the soot from the lion's open jaw with my thumbnail and found the carpenter's initials cut small beneath the lip. Somebody had carved this beast before any of us sailed her, so I took it as leave to keep ladling.