Colour tattoo of a roaring lion head with a red and orange mane on the upper arm, beside a photo of a real lion with the same design superimposed on its head.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Roaring lion head tattoo on upper arm

Upper arm · Colour · Photo

The left panel shows a roaring lion head with a flowing, flame-like mane tattooed on the upper arm, drawn with bold dark outlines and shaded in red, pink and orange. The right panel shows a real lion lying in dry grass with the same tattoo image superimposed over its head. The composition is a side-by-side pairing of the two images.

Upper arm Lion Lion head Mane Roar

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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

Sebastian had lost his roar the winter the rains failed, and the travelling fair that wintered in our valley town would not pay for a lion who only yawned. So Ada Pryce, who kept him, sent for Dunstan Lowe, the sign-painter who did the fairground banners above the chip shop. Dunstan came with a tin of red ochre, a jar of pink for the gums, and a brush that had seen better decades. He spent three days on a square of stretched canvas, painting a roaring head with a mane like a bonfire, and on the Saturday he hung it on the railings so it sat over Sebastian's own head like a mask.

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The children loved it. They pressed their faces to the bars and shrieked at the painted teeth, and the old lion, who had nothing to say to any of them, sat in the straw and let them. Nobody thought to ask Sebastian what he thought about the arrangement. A man from the council came round with a clipboard on the Monday, looked at the canvas for a long moment, and said a lion with a painted face was a poor use of a pound a week. Ada agreed with him, politely, and said nothing else.

That night, with the fair packed up and the valley gone quiet, Sebastian lifted his heavy head and roared at the real moon. The sound rolled over the bins, the allotments and the sleeping rows of terraces, and Ada heard it from her kitchen and put down her cup. Dunstan collected his canvas the next morning and sold it to the landlord of the Crown for two shillings. It hangs above the bar now, roaring at the darts team every Friday, and nobody in the town has ever once looked at it and felt afraid.