Black and grey realism tattoo of a crowned lion head on the forearm of a person in a blue checked shirt, against a brick wall.

Crowned lion on a forearm

Realism · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A realistic lion head wearing a crown is tattooed on the forearm, with the mane flowing down towards the wrist. The shading uses soft greys and fine detail in the fur, eyes and crown to give the animal depth and texture. The photograph shows the arm bent outwards against a red brick wall, with the rest of the person cropped out of frame.

Realism Forearm Lion Crown Mane Portrait

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lion had worn the crown so long that the gold had worn off the bottom edge, and the old king of the ridge would not hear of a new one. Every dry season the animals of the valley came up the goat track to Mbeki's rock to ask him why the rain had stopped, and every dry season he sent them home with the same answer: the sky was waiting for the crown to be polished. Nobody believed him. The jackals certainly did not, and they said so loudly at the water hole, where the mud had cracked into plates like broken roof tiles.

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One evening a girl named Nomvula, the miller's daughter, climbed up with a tin of ochre and a bundle of soft cloth. She had heard the jackals too. She found the lion asleep in the shade of a fig, his mane full of dust and his crown green with lichen. Instead of waking him she knelt and began to clean the crown with spit and cloth, one point at a time, humming the song her grandmother sang when the washing was hung out. The lion opened one eye, then the other, and did not move, because nobody had touched his head in forty years and it felt better than he could say.

When she finished, he stood, shook the dust from his mane, and walked to the edge of the rock. The clouds were gathering over the eastern hills, grey as wet slate. He did not roar. He simply looked at them until they came. Nomvula came down the track with ochre on her fingers, and the first drops hit the red earth behind her as she reached the gate, and she laughed, because she had polished nothing but the crown, and the sky had been waiting for exactly that.