Single-colour blue tattoo on a forearm showing a Scottish saltire with a lion-like figure and black Gaelic-style lettering at the wrist.

Blue saltire and lion on a forearm

Forearm · Colour · Photo

A blue tattoo covers the outer forearm, with a large St Andrew's cross (saltire) and a lion-like figure outlined in blue within the design. Black lettering runs along the wrist, partly cropped, reading as Gaelic-style text. The ink is solid blue with clean outlines on pale skin, and the photo is taken straight on against a dark background.

Forearm Lion Lettering

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bedsheet is still pegged to the washing line when you start, and the wind off the slag heap keeps lifting it as if it wants to read what you've written. You have the blue tin open on the wash-house step and a jam jar of water going brown beside it. Your brother says the saltire has to be right or the lodge will hear about it at the Saturday gala, so you measure twice with a length of string and a stub of chalk, the way your father did on the banners before the pit shut.

Keep reading

By dusk the cross is standing, with pale margins left where the white should show through, and the lion is the hard part. You copy him from the back of a cigarette packet your father kept, rearing up with his tail curled like a question mark. Mrs Lennie from number nine comes out with a mug of tea and says the beast looks like a dog that has seen a ghost. You tell her it is a lion, and she tells you the Lord knows what it is, and you both laugh until paint drips from the brush onto your boot. Under the paws you letter the motto in black, the words your gran used to sing, and the Gaelic comes out crooked on the last letter.

Next morning the sheet is stiff as board and the wind has got into the blue. Where you outlined the lion the colour has bled past the lines, so the beast seems to have grown a second set of claws overnight. You consider repainting it, then leave it, because the lads coming up the road in their work clothes stop and look and nobody laughs. One of them touches the wet hem and says, quietly, that his own da used to hold the other end of the same banner.

You fold it in four and carry it up to the hall over your shoulder like a kit bag. Behind you the shift horn goes, low and long, and the blue lion goes on rearing in the grey light, unbothered, as if he had always meant to look that way.