Black and grey realism tattoo of a lion's head with a full mane, sitting on the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Realistic lion head on forearm

Realism · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A large lion's face looks directly at the viewer, with its eyes, nose and whiskers rendered in fine detail. The mane is built from soft, layered shading that fades into the skin at the edges. The piece is entirely black and grey, and the composition fills most of the forearm against a dark background with blurred green foliage.

Realism Forearm Lion Mane Portrait Big cat

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 trucks stopped at my pump because it was the last lit window for two hundred kilometres, and because old Tomas sat on the bench beside it every evening, watching the ridge to the east as if it owed him money. He had been a tracker before the fences came, and he still spoke of the big rock like a stubborn brother. "It has been looking at the road since before the road," he said. "It does not blink. That is the trouble with it."

Keep reading

I asked him once what the rock wanted. He laughed, a dry sound like a match going out. "Nothing. A lion wants nothing until it is hungry. Then it watches for the one who looks away first." I had a son in Windhoek by then, and a wife who had gone to the coast and not come back, and I supposed I was the one who looked away, because I went inside whenever the light failed and left Tomas to the dark.

The night the dust storm came, I did not go inside. A pickup with two children in the back had slid into the ditch below the ridge, its headlamps pointing at nothing. Tomas took the torch from its hook without a word and walked out into the sand, and I followed because I could not think what else to do. He kept the beam fixed on the rock the whole way, steady as a drum. When we reached the car, the wind dropped for a moment and the ridge stood clear against the sky, its mane of stone lifting above the road.

We got the children out before the storm closed in again. On the way back I saw that Tomas had left the torch on, pointed up at the rock, so that whatever watched from up there could see us come home. I switched on the pump light and left it burning all night.