Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lion head with flowing mane and water splash

Colour · Flash

A lion's head faces right in profile, with its mane streaming back and breaking into splashes of water. The linework uses fine hatched strokes for the fur and face, with dots and spatter for the water. The design is drawn in teal ink over a soft, pale teal watercolour wash on a white background.

Lion Mane Water Splash Watercolour

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

Hush now, and mind the lamp, because this is the part where Old Tam's grandfather got it wrong and had to be shouted at by the gulls. The lion came up out of Scarra Sound on the morning of the big storm, when the ferry was still tied to the pier with its ropes singing. Nobody had seen a lion on Inish Mhor before, and nobody has since, though the fishermen will tell you otherwise after the second glass.

Keep reading

He did not come up roaring. He came up with his head first, the way a swimmer does when he means to be looked at, and the sea ran off his mane in long ropes and fell back in pieces. Every drop that struck the harbour wall turned into a little bird and flew off over the roofs, which is why we still count the gulls on a Monday and never get the same number twice.

Now Nessa Coyle kept the light at the point, and she had a daughter named Brid who did not believe in anything she could not put in a bucket. Brid walked down to the shingle with a bucket and a net. The lion looked at her, and the water in his mane slowed, and for the length of one held breath the whole bay was still as a plate.

"You'll not catch me," he said, in a voice like a wave being pulled back over stones. "But you might carry me, if you're quick about it."

She did not carry him. She let him go, and he went out past the rocks with his mane streaming behind him like a flag, and the storm turned round and went after him. That is the whole of it. Storms are stubborn things, but they are more stubborn about chasing than about staying, and that was the last anyone saw of the lion, though you will still see his mane when the tide is high and the light is low, lifting off the water in long blue strands. Now bed, and no bucket.