Realistic lion face tattoo

Realism · Mixed · Photo

A large lion's face is shown head on, with amber eyes, a broad nose and whiskers drawn in fine lines. The mane is rendered with feathered strokes that fade outwards into the skin. The tattoo uses soft brown and ochre tones with dark shading around the nose, mane and cheeks, and the composition fills the frame.

Realism Lion Mane Eye Whiskers Nose

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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

The bus broke down forty miles short of Tonopah, and the driver walked off into the heat without a word, so that left me, Dolores Pike, a box of tinned peaches and a lion nobody had paid for. The lion belonged to a travelling fairground man named Abe Quill, who had lost his wagon to a card game in Reno and was too proud to say so. He handed me the crate through the window like it was a christening gift. Inside, the beast lay on a bed of straw, its amber eyes open and patient, looking at me as if I were the one in a cage.

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We sat in the shade of a sign that said NO SERVICE NEXT 90 MILES, and I talked to that lion the way you talk to a man who has run out of things to say. I told it about my husband Eddie, who sold encyclopaedias in Ohio and never once looked me in the face. I told it how the wind moved through the creosote in long grey combs. Around the third hour the dust came up off the flats in a brown wall, and the lion lifted its great head and stared into the storm, mane bristling out in feathered streaks like flame going to smoke.

When the dust cleared, a pickup had stopped on the shoulder. A boy in a feed cap was leaning out, staring at the crate. Abe's lion, I told him, was called Mercy, and she was going to Las Vegas to be somebody's headline. The boy grinned and asked if she bit. I said only men who deserved it. Then I climbed up beside him, and the lion went on watching the road behind us until the mountains swallowed it.