Neo-traditional roaring lion tattoo in orange, red and brown with black outlines, covering the forearm.

Roaring lion and scrollwork on a forearm

Neo-trad · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A roaring lion with a swirling mane fills the upper forearm, its mouth open to show teeth and its eye set in a stylised face. The lion is outlined in bold black lines and shaded with orange, brown and red, with white highlights on the whiskers. Scrolling leaf-like foliage in warm orange and red wraps around the lower part of the arm, and the background is a grey t-shirt and dark jeans.

Neo-trad Forearm Lion Roar Mane Scrollwork Leaves Whiskers

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The miller's daughter had already sent two boys running for the priest when the lion came out of the beech wood at Stilling's Edge. It was the colour of bracken in October, its mane a heap of curled leaves, and when it opened its mouth the children at the well could see every tooth, white as peeled ash. Nobody in the village had ever seen a lion.

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Old Tam Hobb did not run. He had carved the lion himself thirty winters back, from an ash the wind had split at the root. He gave it a face, a swirl of mane and a row of teeth, then stopped before the paint went on, because his wife had died that spring and the colours had seemed too bright for a man in mourning. Tam kept the carving at the back of his barn under a sack. Someone must have carried it out.

He walked up the lane with his hands open. The lion lowered its head and the rumble in its chest went quiet, the way a dog goes quiet when it knows the step. Tam knelt in the leaf litter and told it, plainly, that he had left it unfinished and that it had waited long enough. Then he pressed a curl of wood from his coat pocket into the mane, where a scroll should go, and held it there with his thumb.

By morning the lion was back on the lychgate of St Oswin's, nose to the latch, the new curl sitting in its mane. Its eye had been painted gold. Nobody asked who had painted it, and Tam never said.