Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Realistic lion head on forearm

Realism · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A realistic lion head in profile fills the forearm, with the mane rendered in soft, layered strokes that fade toward the top edge. The shading is smooth and detailed, with deep blacks around the nose, eye and jaw and lighter greys on the brow and cheek. The tattoo is in black and grey only and sits centred on the arm against a dark, glossy background.

Realism Forearm Lion Lion head Mane Big cat Portrait

Find an artist for this

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 tide had covered the causeway again, so I sat on the harbour wall with my boots full of brine and waited for the ferry to come back for me. My uncle Iain had sent me across with a flat parcel wrapped in oilcloth and baler twine. Inside was a photograph of a lion's head, creased from being carried in a pocket, and a note in his square hand: Ask Mairi to make him look like he's about to speak.

Keep reading

Mairi kept her studio above the net loft, where the light came in grey off the water and the floor smelled of tar and charcoal. She pinned the photograph to the wall and worked for an hour without saying a word to me. She was building the shadows first, pressing the dark in around the nostrils and the closed corner of the jaw until the face seemed to sink back into the room. The mane she left unfinished at the top edge, soft as smoke, so that it looked less like hair and more like something walking out of the paper.

"Everyone wants the eyes," she said, not looking up. "But the eyes are the easy part. Look where he's looking."

I looked. The lion gazed past the frame, out of the picture, toward a place the photographer had never stood. It was the mainland, I decided, because on an island everything worth watching is on the other side of the water.

When the ferry came back, I carried the drawing down to the chapel gate. The old stone lion there had lost its nose to a winter gale long before I was born, and Iain had been meaning to fix it for thirty years. I held the paper up beside it. In the failing light, the two faces seemed to be turning in the same direction, toward the boat coming in across the grey.