Black and grey realism sleeve tattoo of a lion, elephant, leopard, rhinoceros and buffalo with protea flowers, shown on an upper arm and forearm from two angles.

Black and grey realism animal sleeve

Realism · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

The sleeve covers the upper arm and forearm with a lion's head at the shoulder, followed by an elephant, a leopard, a rhinoceros and a horned buffalo, with protea flowers filling the gaps. The work uses fine, detailed realistic shading with strong contrast in the mane, skin folds and fur. The image shows two views of the same arm against a dark background, and the tattoo is entirely black and grey.

Realism Botanical Upper arm Forearm Lion Elephant Leopard Flower Animal Sleeve

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Day nineteen without rain. Counted from the hide at Lesedi Pan before the heat came up off the clay: one lion, an old male, asleep under the shepherd's tree with his mane gone grey at the tips. Two cow elephants came in at half six, the younger one dragging a broken branch like a flag. Tomas wrote the numbers on the back of a seed packet because the notebook ran out of clean pages on Sunday.

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The leopard came down the dry riverbed at ten past seven, moving the way she always does, as if the ground owed her money. Tomas swore she was thinner than last month, but through the glass I could only see spots and patience. Then a black rhino cow with a calf pressed against her flank, the horn worn blunt from years of shouldering rocks. Behind them the buffalo arrived in a long dark line, eleven of them, a bull at the back with his boss crusted in mud, watching our vehicle the way a man watches a tax inspector.

Tomas asked why I keep counting when the numbers never change. I told him the count is for whoever comes after us with a different notebook and a better pen, someone who will want to know what we had and when we lost it. He didn't answer. He was looking past the bore hole at the one protea that had opened in four months, pink going to bronze in the first light, its petals stiff as cut leather.

I closed the book and wrote the last line in the margin where nobody reads: Lion, one. Elephant, two. Leopard, one, drinking. Rhino, two. Buffalo, eleven. Protea, one, and nobody touched it.