Swirling lion head design

Colour · Flash

A stylised lion head faces left, with a mane built from curling scrolls, wave-like flourishes and tapering tendrils. The design uses bold flat shapes and calligraphic linework in tan, rust red, slate blue, olive green and dark brown. It sits centred on a plain white background with no skin or body part visible.

Lion Lion head Mane Swirl Scroll Tendril

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The frost had got into the paint again by the time I reached the barn, lacing the lion's mane with a white fur that cracked when I touched it. Dad painted him the winter the lower field flooded, using the last of the tins from the gate and the tractor: tan, rust, slate, and that olive green nobody else on the farm would buy. He never said why a lion. He just said the wind needed something to argue with, and the big door faced the road where the gusts came hardest.

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Those scrolls were his doing too. He would stand on an upturned feed bin with a fine brush and curl the lines round and round until they looked like water going down a plughole, then tell me the loops were for the bits of weather you couldn't keep hold of. I thought he was daft. I was sixteen and thought most things were.

The blizzard came in on the Tuesday before Christmas. By dark I could not see the house from the yard, and Mum's ewe was still out on the top pasture with her twins not yet on their feet. I went out along the wall with the torch, losing the wall twice, until the beam caught the tan of the lion's jaw above the barn door. Everything else was white, but he stood out in rust and dark brown, and I followed the spiral of his mane down the lane the way Dad had shown me, one curl at a time, until the wall turned and there they were, pressed into the lee of a hawthorn.

I carried the second lamb inside my jacket. At first light I went back to the barn and scraped the ice from the mane with my thumbnail. Somewhere under the flakes the olive green was still bright, and I left it that way.