Colourful lion head tattoo on the upper thigh, drawn with loose black linework over watercolour-style washes of red, orange, yellow and teal.

Watercolour lion head on thigh

Thigh · Colour · Photo

A lion's head fills most of the frame, drawn with loose black linework that breaks up into the mane. The eyes, nose and muzzle are outlined in fine black lines and shaded with dotted texture, while the mane is filled with red, orange, yellow and teal washes that bleed past the edges of the outline. The tattoo sits on the outer upper thigh against a plain light background.

Thigh Lion Lion head Mane Big cat Animal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The paints came in a biscuit tin with a cracked lid, and by the third week of frost you had used up the last of the teal on the byre door. Your father never asked what you did with his old tubes. He only ever asked whether the ewes were in, and whether you had fed the dog.

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Owen had brought a postcard back from the coast the summer before, a lion's head printed in the wrong colours, and it had been pinned above the Aga ever since. You copied it onto the back of a spent feed sack because the paper was too dear. The mane kept getting away from you. Red ran into yellow the way the frost softens along the top of a gate, and every time you tried to hold a line tight, the water got in first and blurred the jaw into the dark.

On the night the snow came sideways, the top gate blew open and the Cheviot ewes went out onto the hill. You walked the top field with the torch, the beam snagging on hedge and wire, until you saw two green eyes low in the hawthorn. It was only a ewe, flank torn on the wire, her breath coming in clouds. You knelt in the drift and held her head against your knee until the men with the trailer arrived, and your hands were so cold the paint under your nails had gone stiff.

In the morning the feed sack was still on the byre door, the sleet having run every colour down into a single grey stain. Your father stood in front of it a long time with his cap in his hands. Then he set the biscuit tin on the windowsill, lid open, and went out to see about the ewe.