Neo-traditional colour tattoo of a lion wearing a feathered headdress with red berries, placed on an upper arm, with a close-up and a pen sketch of the design beside it.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lion with feathered headdress on an upper arm

Neo-trad · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A large colour tattoo of a lion's head in profile, wearing a green feathered headdress with a beaded band and red berries. The lion has warm orange and tan shading, bold black outlines and flat fills, with green and red accents in the headdress. A top-right inset shows a close-up of the same piece, and a bottom-right photo shows a pen sketch of the lion design on paper.

Neo-trad Upper arm Lion Headdress Feather Berry Bead Sketch

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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

You have been told to finish the lion before the tide turns on Thursday, because Mr Pascoe wants the Marigold dressed for the regatta, and the old figurehead has lost its nose to a winter of gales. The timber has gone grey as driftwood where the paint has flaked. You sit on an upturned crate in the boatyard shed with the sketch pinned beside you, pen lines of a lion in a feathered crown that Aunt Idris drew on the back of a chandlery invoice forty years ago.

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The headdress is the hard part. The feathers have to lift as though they are catching a wind the lion cannot feel. You mix the green from verdigris and linseed, and when it dries it looks like the water under the harbour wall on a still morning. You add the beaded band in cream dots, one at a time, the way she showed you, and then the berries, three red ones set in the crook of the plume, bright as the buoy lamps on the slipway.

The eye is what the fishermen will look at. You paint it last, with the brush you keep for nothing else, and the gold of it takes the light from the open door. Outside, the gulls are fighting over bait. Pascoe comes in with two mugs of tea and stands behind you a long time without speaking.

"She'd have made the berries bigger," he says at last. You say nothing, because the berries are right. You fetch the ladder and carry the lion down to the water, and by dusk the Marigold is out past the breakwater. From the slipway you can still see the gold eye catching what is left of the light, looking back at the town as if it has been waiting for someone to notice it.