Black and grey realism tattoo of a resting lioness with grass detail, placed on a person's upper back near the shoulder blade.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Resting lioness tattoo on upper back

Realism · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A lioness lies with her head raised and forepaws stretched forward, set against a loose patch of grass and foliage. The linework is soft and the shading is smooth, with fine detail in the fur, eyes and whiskers. The tattoo is rendered entirely in black and grey tones, and the composition sits in an oval vignette across the upper back.

Realism Back Lion Big cat Paw Grass Foliage

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody in Leeds at two in the morning wants to hear about a lioness, Mrs Okafor's grandson told me, but the old pub on Call Lane still had a lamp lit over the back door, and that was where Tomas Reilly came in the winter the tram lines were torn up. He had a cardboard box under one arm and a face like wet paper. Inside the box was a stuffed lion cub, the kind a seaside gift shop sells for a few pounds, and he set it on the bar as though it might bite the glass.

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He said his nan had kept lions in the attic. Not real ones, she used to tell him, but she had drawn them so often on the backs of gas bills that the drawings had got out and wandered about the house on their own. The one he had found in her things was asleep with its head up, looking towards the window, waiting for a train that stopped running before either of them was born. Tomas wanted the landlord to tell him whether a thing like that could be sold, or whether it had to be given away to someone who would keep it warm.

The landlord, who had poured forty years of Guinness and believed in very little, turned the cub over and found a name stitched in red thread under its belly. It was not Tomas's nan's name. It was his own, from the year he was four, when she had sat him on the kitchen step and told him he was the bravest thing in the parish. He put the cub back in its box, poured two halves, and said nothing at all, which in that pub was the same as a blessing.