Black ink lion head with the words courage and DEAR HEART above it, tattooed on a forearm in a fine line style.

Lion and courage lettering on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A lion's head facing forward is drawn in black linework on a forearm, with a flowing mane outlined in loose, sketchy strokes. Above it, the word courage is written in joined script, with DEAR HEART in smaller capitals beneath. The design is in black ink only, shown against a grey top and dark jeans in a close crop.

Fine line Lettering Forearm Lion Lion head Mane Courage Script

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

Hobb Ferris had kept the signal box at Wendling Cross for thirty-one years, and in all that time he had never once seen the cast-iron lion on the gatepost of the goods yard move. Children rubbed its nose for luck. Drovers hung their caps on its ears. Its mane had gone smooth and dark from hands, and nobody in the village could say who had carried it up from the foundry or why a lion should be guarding a yard full of coal.

Keep reading

The winter the river came over the line, a girl called Ada Penhallow walked up the platform with a cardboard case and no ticket. She said her brother had gone to the works at Harrow Moss and had not written since Michaelmas. Hobb gave her tea in an enamel cup and told her the last train had already gone, and the next would not run until the water went down. So she sat on the lion's plinth with her coat wrapped round her knees and waited, because there was nothing else to do.

By morning the lamps had guttered and the cup was cold in her hands. Hobb came out with the chalk he used for the timetable board and found her still there, her face set like a fist. "He'll come by the far side," she said. "He always used the far side." She took the chalk from Hobb, stood on the plinth, and wrote along the brick beneath the lion's chin in careful, joined letters: courage. Under it, smaller, she wrote the words her mother had said at every door: dear heart.

Hobb never did learn for certain whether the brother came. But at nine the water dropped, a single engine crept in on the far track, and a man in a flat cap stepped down and looked up at the lion before he looked anywhere else.