Realistic black, grey and brown lion head tattoo with teal eyes on a person's upper arm, shown in daylight outdoors.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Realistic lion head on upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A large lion's head with a full mane fills the upper arm, with the eyes, nose and whiskers rendered in detail. The shading moves from deep black in the mane to lighter grey and brown across the muzzle and face. The teal-green eyes are the only clear touch of colour, and the lion is centred on the arm against a khaki shirt and an outdoor background.

Realism Upper arm Lion Lion head Mane Whiskers Eye

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lion's head came up the Bristol road in a crate that smelt of tar and old straw, and Mr Pryce had me out of bed before the carter had his boots off. Forty years in a travelling menagerie, the crate said, and a fall at Exeter that cracked the jaw. Mr Pryce ran a long thumb over the mane, clotted with dust and something sweeter, and said the beast had been a sorry sight even before it died.

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The glass eyes were gone. Some tinker had taken them for buttons, or the keeper had sold them for gin, and in their place someone had pressed two green marbles from a sweet jar into the sockets. Pryce swore at them. I asked what colour the eyes ought to be, and he took down the ledger from the 1841 shipping and read aloud in his flat voice: 'Lion, male, called Solomon, eyes of a green so pale they look like river water under ice.' He had never seen the beast alive.

So we matched it. I spent a week in the back room with a sable brush, a pot of verdigris and a bottle of linseed, laying the colour on glass a skin at a time, until it looked less like a marble and more like something that might be watching the door. Pryce came in each evening, squinted, and said nothing, which from him was praise.

When the head went up in the front window on the Monday, a boy stopped with his mother and pointed. 'It's looking at me,' he said. Pryce tapped the glass with his pipe. 'Good,' he said. 'That was the job.'