Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tribal lion head in profile

Blackwork · Black and grey · Flash

A stylised lion head in profile facing right, with a flowing mane made of sweeping tapered black shapes. The linework is solid black with no shading, and the detail sits in the mane, eye and open jaw. The design is shown in black on a plain off-white background.

Blackwork Lion Lion head Mane Profile Tribal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The tent had sprung three leaks since Easter and Mr Vashti had stopped paying the man who mended them, so when the rain came through the big top that Thursday, it fell in black ribbons across the sawdust. I was holding the bucket under the lion's cage when Caesar lifted his head and glared at the hole in the canvas as if it owed him money.

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Caesar was twenty-two and had not roared since the winter the Bristol show folded. His mane had thinned at the crown but still fell in long tapered sweeps over his shoulders, the way Mrs Okafor used to comb it out with a wide brass comb before the matinée. She had left in March for a job with a bank in Leeds. Nobody had shown me how to make the mane lie flat.

On the last night we sold forty tickets. Vashti stood in the ring in his frockcoat and announced the lion as though Caesar were still the finest thing in Kent. The lion padded to the drum, opened his jaw wide enough that the front row gasped, and held there. No sound came out, only a long breath that lifted the sawdust into a pale fan.

Afterwards I walked him back to the van in the rain, the wet strands of his mane clumping into dark points that caught the lamplight. At the ramp he stopped and turned his head to the right, the way he does in the old photographs pinned inside the caravan door, and looked out past the gate at the empty road. I held the bucket up over us both and let the rain fall where it wanted.