Black and grey realism tattoo of a lion head with roses and fragments of script on the upper arm and shoulder.

Lion head and roses on upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A mirror selfie shows a large lion head tattoo wrapping across the upper arm and shoulder, with its mane sweeping up towards the top of the arm. Roses and a few lines of small script sit beside the lion on the outer side of the arm. The shading is soft grey and black, giving the fur and face depth, and the photo is taken indoors against a bathroom backdrop.

Realism Upper arm Shoulder Lion Mane Rose Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lion had been painted on the side of the Marguerite Lacey for thirty years, and nobody on the Thames tugs remembered who had done it. When the old barge was broken up at Erith, her figurehead was carried up the bank on two men's shoulders and dumped in the yard behind the chandler's, where the rain got into its mane. Mrs Oddie, who kept the chandler's, said it was bad luck to leave a lion lying face down, so she had it turned over and propped against the wall by the kettle drum.

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The boy who swept the yard was called Tobias, and he was the only one who looked at the carving properly. He noticed the roses carved along the base, the petals worn smooth where hands had patted them for luck, and the faint lines cut beneath them that spelled out a name no longer legible. He went to the library in Dartford on Saturday and copied the lines into a notebook, letter by letter, while a librarian watched him over her glasses.

In March a woman came into the chandler's asking after a brass lamp, and stopped dead at the sight of the lion. She traced the mane with one finger and said her father had sailed under that lion for twenty years, and that the name cut beneath the roses was her mother's, who had died before she could ever see the thing lit on a dark river. Tobias handed her the notebook. She read it twice, then bought the lion for a sum Mrs Oddie refused to say aloud, and asked for it to be carried to a van in the lane.