Colour tattoo of a lion's head framed by peacock feathers and pink flowers across a person's upper back and shoulder blade.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lion head with peacock feathers on upper back

Realism · Back · Colour · Photo

A realistic lion's head faces forward, framed by a mane made of swirling green and purple peacock feathers, with a peacock eye feather at the top and bottom. Pink and red flowers with green leaves sit over the right shoulder, and loose green and red watercolour splashes spread across the background. Shading is soft and painterly with bold, saturated colour throughout, and the design fills the upper back.

Realism Botanical Back Shoulder Lion Lion head Peacock feather Flower Leaves Mane Watercolour splash

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit yourselves down, the 4.10 is late again and it will be later still before the signalman finds his tea. So I'll tell you about the lion from Pardoe's Travelling Menagerie, who came through Crewe in the summer of 1911 and would not get off the platform. He was a big old beast called Sultan, his mane gone thin from years in a van, and the boy who fed him, Tom Gorse, had tied peacock feathers into it for the Whitsun parade in Shrewsbury. Nobody thought to take them out again.

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The feathers had come from Mrs Lowther's bird yard behind the Feathers Inn, where the peacocks screamed at dawn and shed their tails every autumn like old coats. Each feather had an eye at its tip, green and gold and blue, and when the sun came through the iron roof they seemed to open and shut. Sultan liked to stand under the lattice and blink at them. Tom said he was watching for the other peacock, the one sold at Derby and never found again, and the men laughed and said a lion knows nothing of peacocks.

On the third night the lion walked the length of the platform, past the bench where the stationmaster's wife had trained her red roses up the brickwork, and stopped by the waiting room door. The rain had run down the glass in green streaks, and Sultan looked through them as if he had mislaid something in one of the carriages. Tom sat down beside him on the cold boards with a sandwich he did not eat.

The van left for Carlisle the next morning without him. Tom swept that platform for the rest of his life, and each autumn he picked the best eyes from the grass where the peacocks had dropped them and tied them to the lattice, one for every year the lion had not come back.