Black and grey lion head tattoo with loose sketchy linework and ink splashes on an upper arm.

Lion head on upper arm

Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A lion's head with a flowing mane is tattooed on the upper arm, with the face facing forward and the eyes drawn in soft grey shading. The linework is bold and sketchy in places, with dark wash-like splashes around the mane and edges. The ink is entirely black and grey, and the blurred background keeps the focus on the design.

Upper arm Lion Lion head Mane Eye Whiskers

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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 sports hall still smells of floor polish, and someone has pinned the old house banners along the wall, the lion on Ashdown's crest faded to the colour of weak tea. You stand beneath it holding a paper cup of warm wine while Gemma Pryce works the room, asking everyone about their children in the same bright voice. You never liked the lion. Mr Okafor, who taught chemistry, used to say it was a cat that had been told it was a king.

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The mane is what you remember. In the fourth year you filled the back pages of every exercise book with the same head, the hair pulled into dark streaks like smoke off a struck match, and you finished each one by dragging a wet thumb along the edges until the margins looked scorched. Nobody asked you to. It was the only part of school that felt like it belonged to you, and you were careful never to show it to anyone except Gemma, who sat beside you in the last row and pretended to hate it.

She finds you by the trophy cabinet, a cardboard folder under one arm. Thirty years of rumour and she is still the one who knows where things are kept. Inside is a single sheet, soft at the corners, your lion looking up with its brows drawn tight. The eyes are the problem. You shaded them grey late one night because the pencil wouldn't give you the glint you wanted, and now they look like two wet stones at the bottom of a pond.

'The skip took everything else,' she says. 'I thought you'd want this back.' You take it and say nothing useful. Across the hall someone is calling your name in the wrong accent, and the lion on the wall looks down at both of you with the patience of a thing that has outlived its own school. You fold the sheet in three, careful along the creases, and slide it inside your coat where the hall can't see it.