Colourful realistic lion head tattoo with a stylised multicoloured mane on the upper arm, shown in two side by side views.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lion head tattoo on upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A lion's head fills the upper arm, with the face shaded in realistic orange, yellow and brown tones and a white muzzle. The mane is drawn as flowing, stylised swirls in blue, green, red and yellow that wrap around the arm. The image shows two near identical views of the same tattoo side by side.

Realism Neo-trad Upper arm Lion Mane Big cat

Find an artist for this

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

No, sit nearer, the kettle can wait, because this is the part where my great uncle Ferris lost his boots. Forty summers he worked the lock barges on the river below Gloucester, and the year the water ran brown as tea, a lion came down out of the willows and asked him for a lift.

Keep reading

Its face was the colour of a lamp turned low, orange going gold at the cheeks, with a muzzle white as flour. But the mane was never hair. It was river weed lit from underneath, blue where the current ran fast, green in the slack eddies, red where the sunset caught it, and yellow wherever the reeds bent over to listen. Ferris swore you could hear it hum.

The lion wanted to go downstream to the sea, and it would pay in its own way. Ferris asked for nothing grand, only that the lock gates would stop sticking in winter. The lion laughed, a sound like a bucket tipped down a well, and said the gates were never the trouble. The trouble was stillness. Water that stops forgets its colours, and so does a man. Then it lay down in the bow, and Ferris steered them through the dark, past three bridges and one drowned church.

They never reached the sea. At the weir the barge snagged, and the lion slipped off into the foam, taking Ferris's boots with it, which he never forgave. Every spring, my uncle said, a new swirl of colour turns up in the river just where a mane would be. So when the water goes gold at the bend, don't lean over the side to look. Just nod, and leave him a crust.