Black and grey realism tattoo of a lion and two roses covering the upper arm and forearm as a full sleeve.

Lion and roses realism sleeve

Realism · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A lion's head with a full, flowing mane fills the upper arm, with two shaded roses on the forearm below it. The lion is rendered with fine hair strokes and soft grey gradients, and a close-up panel on the right shows the face in more detail. The image is a three-panel collage of the same arm from different angles against a plain grey background.

Realism Upper arm Forearm Lion Mane Rose Sleeve Portrait

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Brother Anselm had been told the lion would be finished by Lady Day, and by February it still had no mane. He sat on the scaffold with a chisel in one hand and a cold pie in the other, watching rain run off the cloister roof onto the rose bed below. The abbot wanted a beast that would frighten the wool merchants on the Lancaster road. What Anselm had was a block of grey gritstone that kept showing him a face that looked tired.

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He worked the hair in short, fine strokes, the way his old master had taught him with a bent nail. Each strand had to lie against the one beside it or the whole thing turned to rubble. Down the wall, Sister Hild pruned the roses she had planted the year the sickness came through, and she never once looked up at him. When he asked why the lion's eyes should look so sorrowful, she said a lion that could not be sorrowful was only a lamp with teeth.

On the last morning he cut the eyes deeper than he meant to and stopped, afraid of spoiling them. Hild came along the path with a basket of cut stems and stood under the scaffold, looking up at the face in the grey light. "There," she said. "Now he's listening." Anselm climbed down, wiped the dust from his hands, and found he had nothing to add.