Colour realism tattoo of a lion's head with a blended orange and rainbow mane, shown on the calf.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lion head on a lower leg

Realism · Calf · Colour · Photo

A lion's head faces forward with amber-yellow eyes, a pink nose and dark nostril shading, and whiskers across the muzzle. The mane is rendered in soft, blended strokes that shift from rust and orange to blue, green and purple toward the right edge. The tattoo fills the frame against a plain black background, with the skin's curve visible at the sides.

Realism Calf Lion Mane Whiskers Portrait

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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

Sit down, the lift's out again, so you'll have to hear it from me. Kestrel House had forty-one floors of grey and nothing on the walls but damp and the council's notices, until the summer Dez Harrigan came up from the car park with a tin of paint he'd nicked from the bins behind the hardware shop.

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He painted a lion on the stairwell wall at the fourteenth landing, a big head with yellow eyes, a pink nose, whiskers like fine wire. He gave it a mane that started rust and orange at the top, then went blue where the sky came in through the window, green and purple where the sunset caught the flats opposite. Every evening it changed, love. You'd come up with your shopping and the mane had moved, like it had been out in the wind.

The council sent Mr Pryce with two men and a roller of grey emulsion. They started at the bottom and worked up. The paint went on, and the lion's mane came through it anyway, bleeding colour like a bruise through a sheet. They tried eight nights running. On the ninth, the whole block came out onto the landings with torches and phones, not saying a word, and the men stood there with the roller dripping onto their boots.

Mr Pryce went home that night and never came back to Kestrel House. In the morning the grey had blistered clean off the nose, and the lion was looking straight down the stairwell at the lift doors, the way you'd look at someone you were waiting for. The lift still doesn't work. We don't mind. We take the stairs and say good morning to him.