Enlarged with AI from a smaller original
Stylised lion with cloud swirls
Japanese · Black and grey · Flash
A stylised, lion-like creature with a curled mane and open jaws is drawn in bold black outline on a textured, pale grey background. Swirling cloud motifs and small curled wisps surround its head and back, and the shading is limited to solid black accents and light grey tones. The composition is a single centred figure that fills most of the frame.
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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction
The lion's jaw had come unhinged in the typhoon, and you spent the whole wet week trying to fix it with cement mixed from crushed oyster shell. Your grandfather would have laughed at you. He always said the shishi on the ridge above Hanagi did not need fixing, only watching, because a guardian that is looked after too kindly stops guarding and starts being a pet.
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The old story goes that a mason carved it from grey island stone to hold back the cloud that rolled down off the peak each autumn to steal the fishermen's children. He ran short of stone before he finished the mane, so he cut the curls from the wind itself, and the lion has been swallowing weather ever since. You know this is nonsense. You also know that the storm which came in last Tuesday turned aside at the headland, and that the fog lifted off the bay the morning after you scrubbed the lion's ears with a wire brush and a bucket of brine.
On the last evening the mortar finally held. You sat on the low wall with your palms raw and watched the cloud gather over the peak, grey as the lion's flank, and waited for it to turn. It did not turn. It slid down the slope in one long curl, broke against the stone jaws, and the lion, for once, closed its mouth.
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