Black and grey realistic tattoo of a lion's head with a full mane, shown on the upper leg.

Realistic lion head on a thigh

Realism · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A realistic lion's head faces slightly to the side, with a full, flowing mane rendered in dense black shading. Fine strands and soft gradients define the fur, the eyes and the muzzle, and the whiskers are picked out in lighter lines. The design fills the frame in a close crop, with the skin tone showing around the edges.

Realism Thigh Lion Mane Big cat Portrait

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

By the last week of August the Pennick orchard had gone quiet the way it did before picking, wasps drunk on windfalls and the grass gone the colour of old straw. Mrs Abel had been counting trees for three days when the lion came up the lane from the river, walking as if the road were his own, his mane thick with burrs.

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He wasn't hungry, and that was the odd thing. He lay down between the Blenheim rows and watched the pickers with his heavy, patient eyes. When Tom Hobday brought him a bucket of water he drank, then gave Tom a look that said the bucket was a poor offering. Nobody could say where he had come from. The travelling fair had packed up a month before, and its keeper swore he had left nothing behind but a cart with a broken axle.

The village argued through two evenings. Mrs Abel said a beast that came asking for nothing was owed something back, so they left a sheaf of barley by the gate and a sack of bruised fruit at the end of each row. Each morning the barley was gone and the fruit was split open, the pips laid out in a neat line along the wall, as if someone had worked a sum and wanted it checked.

On the last night of the picking the lion stood, shook the burrs from his mane, and walked down the lane toward the river without looking back. Tom went out with the lantern and found, in the dust where the cat had lain, a single apple pip pushed upright into the earth. Mrs Abel said to leave it be, so they did, and by spring a green shoot had come up there, and it bore fruit the next autumn, small and hard and very sweet.