Realistic colour tattoo of a lion's head with a flowing mane in orange, yellow and purple tones, on a person's upper back.

Realistic lion head on upper back

Realism · Back · Colour · Photo

A detailed lion's head faces forward, with yellow eyes, a dark nose and whiskers rendered in fine strokes. The mane is built from layered orange, brown, yellow and purple-grey shading that softens toward the edges. The lion sits centrally on smooth skin, with the shoulder blade area and part of a window blind visible at the top left.

Realism Back Lion Mane Big cat Portrait

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dad said never to look a lion in the eye on the first morning, so I looked at his mane instead, which was the colour of stewed tea and went purple-grey at the ends where the generator smoke had got into it. Caesar didn't mind. He lay across the straw in the back of the horsebox with his chin on his paws and watched me with those yellow eyes as if I were a late ticket.

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The fair had pitched on the rec outside Wantage for a fortnight, squeezed between the dodgems and a chip van called Sunny Side. Every night the lamps came on at seven and Caesar walked the ring with the same slow contempt for the crowd, roaring only when the calliope stopped. Dad had said the roar was his wages. Dad had been dead since March, and I was the one who had to open the gate.

On the last morning the showground was empty and the caravan blind rattled against its frame. Caesar got up, which he never did before noon, and padded to the step of the horsebox. He stood there a long while, looking past the Waltzers toward the hedge where the lane runs out, and I understood he was not going to perform for anyone again. I unbolted the gate. He walked into the wet grass like a man leaving a bad job, and at the hedge he turned once, the low sun catching the gold in his eyes and the grey at the tips of his mane, before he went into the stubble and was gone.

The scrap man in Abingdon paid forty pounds for the horsebox and asked where the lion was. I told him Caesar had gone to see about his mane. He didn't laugh, but he counted the notes twice, and I think he wanted to.