Black fine line and dotwork tattoo of two lions' heads inside overlapping geometric diamonds on the inner forearm.

Two lions in a geometric frame on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows two lions' heads side by side, one partly overlapping the other, with mane detail drawn in fine single lines. Shading is built from dense stippled dots on the faces and manes, and the heads sit inside overlapping angular diamond and triangle outlines. The ink is black on pale skin, with a knitted white sleeve at the top of the frame.

Fine line Dotwork Geometric Forearm Lion Diamond Triangle Geometric frame Mane

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The well at Sarn Qadir had been dry for three summers when the two lions came down off the escarpment, each one certain the last of the water was its own. The elder, Haddar, had a mane gone grey at the tips and a limp from a fall on the scree. The younger, Ilsa, had never once been told no by anyone who meant it.

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They met at the lip of the stone basin at noon, when the sun stood straight overhead and threw no shadow at all. Ilsa said she had smelled the water first. Haddar said he had heard it first, which was true, because he had lain beside the rock for two nights listening to the drip underneath. They argued until the heat flattened the words, then both looked up at the road between the cliffs, a narrow line like the edge of a folded letter.

Haddar proposed a walk. The road bent four times between the cliffs, and whoever reached the fourth bend and came back to the basin first would drink. Ilsa walked anyway, one ahead and one behind, each watching the other's shoulder over the rise of the dunes. Their manes caught the dust and held it in fine grey lines, the way frost holds on a wire fence in the early morning.

When they reached the basin again, the water had risen in the night, sweet and cold from a seam nobody had known was there. They drank from the same hollow with their heads bent together, so close their ears touched. The drivers who passed that way later said the two shadows on the stones looked like one lion with a double face, angled like a diamond, and that the well never failed after that, though nobody agreed whether the lions or the road deserved the credit.