Black lettering reading Croi de Leon runs vertically down the upper back of a woman in a black top, with a small knot symbol beneath, in a lettering style.

Vertical lettering on upper back

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A woman with dark hair is photographed from behind, showing a tattoo of the words Croi de Leon set in vertical capitals along the centre of her upper back. A small loop or knot symbol sits below the final word. The ink is solid black with no shading or colour, and the text fills most of the frame's central column against plain skin and a black strappy top.

Lettering Back Lettering Text Phrase Upper back

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Her mother had told her the apple trees on the hill would give nothing to a coward, so Nessa climbed the old Bramley at the top of Kilgorran orchard in the last week of August, when the wasps were drunk on fallen fruit and the grass smelt of cut hay. The lion had been living in the stone wall below the orchard since midsummer. Nobody had seen it, but the hens had stopped laying, and the farmer's dog came home with its tail between its legs.

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The lion came out at dusk, when the light turned the colour of weak tea. It was thinner than the stories said, its mane matted with burrs, and it did not roar. It sat at the foot of the tree and looked up at her the way the schoolmaster looked at a sum that would not come right.

She asked it what it wanted. It said nothing, and she understood then that it had been waiting for someone to ask. It had come across the sea on a ship that never went back, and it had no road home. Its heart, it said, had been left in a field where it had once been brave.

Nessa picked the last hard apple from the branch above her and dropped it into the grass beside the lion. "Then go and fetch it," she said, and the lion, for the first time in years, stood up straight.