Realism back piece of a lion and classical figures across a torso, shown in a four-panel collage in black and grey with warm brown tones.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lion and classical figures back piece

Realism · Back · Mixed · Photo

A large realistic tattoo covers most of a shirtless torso, showing a lion's head at the centre with a horse and two robed or draped figures above and below it. The shading is smooth and sculptural, with strong highlights on the mane and fur that give the lion a carved, stone-like appearance. The four panels are mostly grey with warm sepia tones, and the composition fills the frame edge to edge.

Realism Back Lion Horse Figure Drapery

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 lion came up out of the sea at Scarrow Point in the year the big storm took the old pier. Nobody had carved it. It was simply there on the rocks below the lighthouse, pale and enormous, with its mane combed back by the water and a rider's hand resting on its head as if he had fallen asleep there. The fishermen said it was a sculptor's block lost off a Dutch barque, and the keeper's wife said it was nothing but a ledge of chalk that happened to look like a beast.

Keep reading

Old Tam Gillies kept the light then. He had a grey mare called Mab who pulled the lamp oil cart up the cliff path every Tuesday, and she would not go past the lion. She stood with her ears flat and her hooves dug into the turf until someone turned her round. One November night the fog came in thick as porridge, and Tam's boy Sandy went down to the shore for the dinghy and did not come back up.

Tam climbed down with the storm lantern. He found Sandy wedged in the surf below the lion's shoulder, cold but breathing, and the boy swore the stone had moved, that its great head had turned to keep the waves off him. Tam did not believe a word of it. He said the lion had only been waiting for the tide to show him where the boy lay.

After that Mab was led past the lion every week with a sugar lump and a word of thanks, and the light was never once let go out. In the mornings the mane still shines wet with spray, and the lamp goes up at dusk the same as ever.