Two black and grey dotwork tarot card tattoos on the lower legs, showing The Chariot on the left and Strength with the numeral VIII on the right.

Tarot cards The Chariot and Strength on legs

Dotwork · Calf · Black and grey · Photo

Two framed tarot card tattoos sit side by side on the lower legs. The left card shows The Chariot with a rider and animals in a stippled, engraved style, and the right card shows Strength with a woman beside a lion, labelled with the numeral VIII. Both use fine outlines with dense dotwork shading in black ink, and the cards are set against bare skin on a light background.

Dotwork Traditional Calf Strength Lion Woman Animal Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lion has been eating the rhubarb again, and Mrs Pargeter wants it moved before the vicar's wife arrives for tea. You find it lying under the medlar tree with its chin on its paws, a great tired thing the colour of old brass. Nobody has told you what to do about it. Nobody ever does. The garden at Hollin Court has been walled on four sides since before the Restoration, and in all that time the only thing that has ever leaned on those walls is the wind.

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Mrs Pargeter's niece, Idris, took the lion in as a cub from a travelling fair that folded in the rain. She kept it on a rope of braided linen and taught it to sit for biscuits. You remember her on the stone step with her hands buried in its mane, combing out burrs with her fingers while the lion closed its eyes. She never raised her voice. When the carter came up the gravel to collect the cub for a zoo in Bristol, he stopped at the gate and would not come in.

Her cart, the old black chariot with its two mismatched horses, stands in the coach house under a sheet. It has not been out since the fair. You pull the sheet away and find the reins still knotted the way she left them, and a letter tucked into the seat: Walk him, don't pull him. The garden will hold if you let it. You do not know whether she meant the lion or the wall. You pick up the rope anyway.

At dusk you lead the lion down between the espaliered pears and out through the postern gate, where the ground beyond is only long grass and a lane running down to the river. The lion stops at the threshold and looks back at the walled beds as though counting them. Then it goes on at your side, slow and certain, the rope slack in your hand.