Black and grey realism tattoo of a lion wearing a crown with a lettered banner and a hanging chain, on the upper arm.

Realistic lion with crown and chain on upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey lion's head with a detailed mane fills the upper arm, topped by a crown with a fleur-de-lis and a banner lettered with a name. A chain with a small key-shaped pendant hangs from the lower mane and carries a script word. The shading is smooth and layered, with soft grey gradients in the fur and sharp highlights in the eyes and nose.

Realism Upper arm Lion Crown Banner Chain Key Script Mane Fleur-de-lis

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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 closer, the wind up here takes words off the tongue before they reach the ear. You want the lion of Scarrow Pass? Then you'll hear it the way my grandmother told it, with the goats complaining at the back.

Keep reading

Scarrow had a lion once, a grey-maned beast as big as a cart, who kept the snow off the road by lying across it. The travellers called him king because he wore a crown of old horseshoe nails, and he dragged a chain of iron links behind him like a sledge rope. Nobody knew who had locked him. The blacksmith in Dunlen swore he had never forged a link of it.

One winter a girl named Ysolde Penn came up the pass with a wagon of salt and a debt to pay her brother's creditors. The lion met her at the bend where the cairn leans. She did not run. She asked what he wanted for letting her by, and he looked at her a long while, then turned his head so she could see the key hanging from the chain at his shoulder, small as a thumb, its bow shaped like a heart.

"Take it," he said, though lions do not speak. "Open what you like. Then leave me to the road."

She didn't. She sat with him through the night, brushing the snow off his chain, until the morning light made the key glint like a coin. In the spring she unlocked nothing. She tied the key to her own wrist and carried it down into the valley, and the lion stayed on the pass, and that is why the road is never closed, though the mountain keeps its own counsel about who holds the key.