Black and grey realistic lion tattoo running down a forearm, showing the face, mane and front paws in fine shading.

Realistic lion portrait on a forearm

Realism · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A large lion tattoo shows the animal's face looking straight ahead, with a full, shaded mane framing the head and its front paws below. The work is done in black and grey, with soft gradients in the fur and fine white highlights on the whiskers and paw edges. Grass-like strokes fade out around the lower part of the design against pale skin and a grey background.

Realism Forearm Lion Mane Whiskers Paw Grass Big cat

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The snow shut the Pennine road on the Tuesday, and by dusk the only other guest at the Crooked Hart was a menagerie man called Silas Quill, who had come up the hill with a cart, a mule and a lion under a tarpaulin. I told him the lion could sleep in the wash-house. He said the lion would sleep wherever it could see the fire, and he was right, because when I carried the lamp through at midnight there it sat on the hearthrug, grey about the muzzle, staring at the flames as though they owed it money.

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His name was Caesar and he was nineteen, which Silas said was old for a lion and young for a grudge. I asked what he ate these days. Mostly bread soaked in milk, Silas said, and the occasional argument with the mule. He told me Caesar had been born in a tent outside Preston and had never once stood on grass that wasn't trodden flat by a showground crowd, yet he kept his head high and his eyes fixed past my shoulder, toward the window where the drifts were climbing the glass. Nobody else in the room held that look for long.

On the third morning the wind dropped and the sun came up white over the moor. I went out to the yard with the coal scuttle and found the snow trampled into a path from the wash-house to the gate, big round prints, one after another. Beside the gatepost a tuft of dry grass had been pushed up through the drift, though nothing grew there in January. Silas was already loading the mule. He saw me looking and shrugged. Caesar had been out before dawn, he said, to see whether the road was still there.

I never learned where they went. The cart ruts ran down towards the valley, and I like to think they kept going until the snow gave out and the grass came up green to the lion's chest. The coins he left on the bar were stiff with cold when I found them, and I kept them in the till as if they might buy another visit.