Black and grey Japanese style tattoo of a guardian lion with open jaws, a small demon on a pedestal and waves, covering the upper arm and shoulder.

Japanese guardian lion on upper arm

Japanese · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A large guardian lion with an open mouth, fangs and swirling smoke-like clouds dominates the upper arm and shoulder. Below it, a small horned demon sits on an ornate pedestal, with stylised waves wrapping around the lower part of the sleeve. The work uses detailed shading and fine linework in black and grey, with a faint reddish accent near the centre of the design.

Japanese Upper arm Shoulder Lion Demon Wave Cloud Smoke

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The stone lion above the fish market has had its mouth open for two hundred years, and every morning you climb the forty steps past it with the gulls already complaining about the catch. Your grandmother told you it was swallowing the sea's bad weather. Your father said it was simply badly carved, the teeth too big for the jaw. You believed her, mostly, because the lion's cloud-curls were always damp and the little horned thing it crouched over on its plinth had a sly, sideways grin that nobody else seemed to notice.

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The autumn the herring failed, the harbour master wanted the shrine pulled down for the new slipway. Men with ropes came up the steps. You stood at the top with a chisel you had no right to hold and said the lion was guarding something, not eating it. Nobody asked what. They laughed, and a boy threw a bottle that smashed against the plinth, and the demon's face, which had been pale with age, went dark with wet, as if the stone had been drinking.

That night a swell came in from the south with no wind behind it. Waves stood up in the lower harbour like wrestlers, and by morning the slipway was buckled, the new timbers gone, the boats riding quiet at their moorings. The harbour master climbed the steps himself, cap in his hands, and asked what you intended to do. You pointed at the lion. It looked back at you with its enormous open mouth, and you understood, with the cold clarity of a dawn that should not have been so calm, that it had never once been eating the storm.