Colour realism tattoo of a lion's head with a full golden mane on the upper arm and shoulder, shown in a close photograph.

Lion portrait on an upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A lion's head faces the camera, with its eyes, nose and mouth detailed and its mane rendered in loose, flowing strokes. The shading moves from deep browns and blacks in the shadows to warm ochre, yellow and orange highlights, with touches of green and teal near the edges. The tattoo fills most of the frame on the upper arm, with a dark grey top at the edge of the photo.

Realism Upper arm Lion Mane Animal Portrait

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lion over the gate of Carrow Keep had lost its nose to a cannonball in wars nobody in the valley could name any more, and its mane had weathered to the colour of wet bracken. Every spring the swallows nested in the stone where its eyes had been, and every spring old Mab Tennant climbed the scree with a pot of ochre and a horsehair brush to paint it back.

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The village laughed at her. A lion is a thing you see in a book or at a fair, they said, and she had seen neither. But Mab had watched the ruin's shadow move at dusk, when the low sun came through the arrow slits and the mane seemed to lift in a wind that blew nowhere else. She mixed the ochre with egg yolk and river clay and worked her strokes outward from the brow, long and loose, the way she imagined hair moving under water. Where the shadow pooled she used a deep brown and a black burned from hazel, and at the edges she let a green from crushed nettle sit like weed on a stone.

The autumn the bridge washed out, a drover came up the track with a lame grey pony and asked the way to the steward's house, which had been a heap of nettles for forty years. He stopped beneath the gate and looked up. The lion wore its new mane, the ochre still tacky at the edges, and he said the thing nobody had said before: it looked as though it had only just heard its name. Mab told him it was paint. He said his grandmother had told him the same about the river.

He left before dark. In the morning Mab climbed the scree and found the eyes done, two amber stones of colour set exactly where she had been too frightened to put them, and her brush lying dry on the step. The swallows came back that spring to the nest in the lion's mouth, and she never painted it again, because it had begun to fade only in the places she had not touched.