Black and grey realism tattoo of a roaring crowned lion with a flag and spear on a person's upper back and shoulder.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Crowned lion with flag on upper back

Realism · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A roaring lion wearing a crown dominates the image, with a flag and spear rising behind its head and smoke or mist shaded around the figure. The linework is soft and the shading is detailed, with strong contrast in the mane and face. The image is a close crop of a back and shoulder, and the tattoo is rendered entirely in black and grey ink.

Realism Back Shoulder Lion Crown Flag Spear Smoke

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The smoke had reached the chapel roof before Tomas Veal thought to lower the standard. He stood on the bell-tower steps with the pole braced against his hip, and the linen snapped and bellied above him, the crowned lion torn at one corner where a crossbow bolt had found it at dawn. Below, the lane was full of men shouting the names of streets that were already gone.

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Captain Ysolde Marr had ordered the banner kept high, because a lion seen through smoke tells the watchers on the far bank that the keep still holds. Tomas did not argue. He had carried it since the ford at Hallow Bend, and he had learned that a man could stop being afraid if he concentrated on the weight of the spear and the grain of the ash wood. The spear was the one thing the old king had given the company that had not been sold for bread.

By noon the roof was gone and the bell hung cracked above them. Ysolde climbed up beside him with her face black from soot and held out a strip torn from her own shirt. 'Tie it to the spear,' she said. 'Let them see it's still ours.' He did, and the lion's mane lifted in the hot wind, its open mouth roaring at a sky the colour of old pewter.

When the enemy came at dusk they found the tower empty but the banner still flying, and they stopped at the foot of the steps, uncertain, as though the beast itself might come down and take them. Tomas had gone by then, down the far side with the others, the standard folded inside his coat. Somewhere past the bridge he unrolled it beneath a bare willow and saw that the crown had survived the smoke, its gilt gone to a grey ghost that caught the last of the light.