Three photos of lion tattoos on an upper arm and shoulder: a realistic roaring lion in black and grey, a shaded lion head with a mane, and a rough, mostly grey lion design with red fill.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lion tattoos at three price points

Realism · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

The collage shows three lion tattoos on skin, with a price caption under each photo. The top-left piece is a detailed, roaring lion in black and grey with soft shading and sharp teeth. The top-right piece is a darker lion head with a full mane, shaded in grey, while the bottom piece is a loosely drawn lion face with an open mouth, grey outlines and red and green fill.

Realism Upper arm Shoulder Lion Lion head Mane Roar Teeth

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ferry from Lerwick had been four days out when the bosun asked Mags Doyle what she had paid for the lion on her arm, and she told him ten shillings. He laughed until he had to sit on a coil of rope. Everyone aboard had an opinion about lions that winter. The rich men in Hull bought theirs by the yard, shaded so fine a man could count the hairs in the mane, and they roared from their skin like a bell struck in a church.

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Mags had gone to a barber on Scale Lane whose hands shook at the end of the day. He had only red and green ink left in the bottle, and he drew the beast from memory with a grey outline, its mouth open wide enough to show every tooth he could remember. It was not handsome. The sailors called it the bag of teeth, and the bosun said it looked like a lion that had been left out in the rain.

Then the wind came round to the north-west and the sea stood up in grey walls. The deck lamps went out one by one. The big lions, the expensive ones, had roared all the way down the Humber and sounded fine in calm water, but in that gale nobody could hear them above the sea. Mags climbed to the bow with the cold burning her shoulder and opened her mouth the way the barber had drawn it. What came out was a roar with no polish on it at all, rough and red as the ink, and it carried over the wind.

They followed that sound back to the harbour light. The bosun bought her a drink in Lerwick and never mentioned the price again, though he still called her the lion woman whenever she came aboard.