Colour Japanese style tattoo of a red foo dog with green swirling clouds and a skull on a forearm, shown in two side-by-side photos.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Foo dog and skull on a forearm

Japanese · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A red and orange foo dog with a snarling mouth, bared fangs and yellow eyes sits within green swirling cloud motifs, with clawed paws at the lower edge. Below it, a skull with glowing orange shading and a grinning jaw is set against darker shadowed tones. Bold outlines, smooth colour fills and pink circular accents fill the forearm, shown in two angled photos.

Japanese Forearm Lion Skull Cloud Claw Swirl

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lion head had been sulking since the church bells in Limehouse stopped. Dev Chowdhury, who had carried it for eleven years, could feel the weight shifting behind his neck like a bag of wet sand. He had asked the groom's uncle for the room behind the kitchen, and the uncle had handed him a bottle of lager and a look that said the lion was his problem now.

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The skull was the trouble. Someone had hung a carved skull from the banqueting hall's chandelier as a joke, a thing the bride's brother had brought back from Mexico, and the lion's eyes had found it the moment the doors opened. Dev knelt by the open case and saw the mouth of the old papier-mâché head had split along a seam, the paint lifting in red scales. Green cloud swirls ran down the cheeks where his grandmother had painted them, and the pink discs on the flanks had faded to the colour of boiled ham.

He stitched the seam with waxed thread and a length of the bride's floristry wire, working by the light of a phone torch while the band tuned up through the wall. Through the gap he could hear the best man giving a speech about sheep.

When he finally stepped into the hall, the lion went down the aisle of tables at a stately trot, pausing under the chandelier. The skull swung. Dev lifted the lion's head toward it, the old beast opened its jaws, and every guest went quiet. Then the drummers hit the beat, and the skull, for a moment, looked like it was grinning along.