Colour tattoo of a snarling lion head in Japanese style, with orange and grey-green shading and bold black outlines, on a person's arm or leg.

Lion head with flowing mane on a limb

Japanese · Other · Colour · Photo

A large lion head faces left, with its mane rendered as sweeping, layered strands that fill the background around it. The lion has bold black outlines, with orange highlights and grey-green shading that give the face and mane a sculpted, dimensional look. The design is cropped by the frame, and the dark background makes the orange and green tones stand out strongly.

Japanese Neo-trad Other Lion Mane Lion head

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lion on the front of the ring curtain had been painted by a man who drank, and by the time Mr Carrow sent me up the ladder with a tin of orange paint and two sable brushes, its mane had faded to the colour of wet slate. There were eleven of us left in the Carrow Travelling Menagerie that spring. I was the only one who could climb without swearing, which was why I got the lion.

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Rosa, who had trained the big cat for twenty years, sat on an upturned crate and watched me work. Her real lion, Samson, lay in the straw behind the wagon with his own mane gone thin and patchy. Every afternoon he padded out to the ring to stare at the curtain, and every afternoon she called him back. "He thinks it's another lion," she said. "He's a bit old to be jealous."

I gave the painted face its bold black edges first, the way the old sign men did, then laid the orange over the brow and cheek until the fur seemed to lift off the cloth. Grey-green went into the hollows of the mane, layer on layer, until it looked like wind moving through long grass. By dusk the thing was so fierce that the boy selling peanuts crossed himself.

On the last night the tent was half empty and the band packed up early. Rosa led Samson out to the sawdust anyway, slowly, and he stood under the curtain and lifted his head at the orange lion above him. Neither of them roared. Samson simply stepped forward until his nose touched the cloth, and left a faint smear of paint on his whiskers that Rosa never let him wipe off.