Full-colour realistic tattoo of a lion head with a dark mane and amber eyes, on a limb of the body.

Realistic lion head portrait

Realism · Other · Colour · Photo

A lion's head faces forward, with a full, dark mane framing the face and a pale muzzle, nose and whiskers. The shading is soft and blended, with fine fur-like strokes in brown, ochre, amber and black. The design fills most of the frame against plain skin.

Realism Other Lion Lion head Mane Whiskers

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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

Sit down, love, and leave the kettle be, because you'll want both hands for this one. Nobody on the fourteenth floor of Carrow House believed Dennis Pike when he said the lion lived in the lift shaft. Dennis drank Tuesday to Thursday and was never sober enough to make a good liar. But the lift stuck between seven and eight for three weeks that winter, and every time the doors opened the air smelled of hot straw and rain.

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Old Mrs Okafor on six swore she heard it breathing through the ventilation grille, a slow pull and push like a bellows in the dark. Then Ray, the caretaker, who had been up and down those stairs for thirty years, found a single amber eye pressed to the mesh of the bin chute on the landing. He didn't scream. He fetched the torch, and when he shone it down the chute the eye was still there, steady and unblinking, as if it had been waiting for someone with the sense to look.

Nobody knows what passed between Ray and that animal. What I know is that the following Monday the lift worked, the bin chute was bolted shut, and Ray started wearing a rag the colour of old marmalade tied round his wrist, and he never said why. Every night after, when the wind came off the ring road and the whole block creaked like a ship, the residents said the same thing: the lion was keeping watch from somewhere above us, and it would not be moved on by the council.

So when the developers came round with their clipboards, asking who was living on the fourteenth floor, Mrs Okafor just smiled and told them to take the stairs. They never came back. Ray's rag is in a drawer somewhere, and the lift still sticks between seven and eight, which is how we know the lion is still at home.