A realism style black and grey lion head tattoo within an ornate frame on the outer thigh of a person wearing black tights.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lion head in ornate frame on a thigh

Realism · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A lion's head facing forward with a full mane is set inside an ornate, shield-like frame with scrollwork at the top and bottom. The tattoo uses fine shading and soft grey tones to render the fur and face, with darker lines defining the frame. The photograph is a selfie taken at an angle, with the tattoo sitting centrally on the thigh and the subject's face not visible.

Realism Thigh Lion Lion head Mane Ornate frame Scrollwork

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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 hall smells of floor polish and warm sausage rolls, and you stand by the trestle table holding a plastic cup of wine that tastes of pennies. Someone has pinned the old house crest to a corkboard: a lion's head inside a shield, scrolled at the top and bottom like a gate nobody remembered to lock. Mr Akroyd's lion, everybody called it, because he made you copy it onto the front of every exercise book in Year Nine.

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Dev Okafor finds you before you find him. His hair has gone grey at the temples, but he still has the crooked grin, and he asks whether you kept the pencil case with the lion stamped on the lid. You tell him it went in a skip in 2003. He says he knows, because he was the one who threw it. You laugh, and for a second the room is all cold radiators and the chalk dust that settled on your blazer every afternoon.

You talk about house points, the Easter disco, the girl who was sent home for getting biro on her hands. He insists the lion was never a lion at all, that the art teacher copied it from a stained window in a different school altogether. You decide not to believe him. Then he shows you his phone, a photo of a lion in an ornate frame, drawn in soft grey shading. His daughter chose it, he says. She told him it looked like it was keeping watch.

You look back at the corkboard. The lion's fur is drawn one fine hair at a time, and you realise it has been watching the whole room all evening. You pick up a pen from the table, find your name on the attendance sheet, and write your married name beside the old one, a little uneven, the way you used to write on that lid.