Colourful neo-traditional roaring lion head tattoo with a flowing mane on the inner forearm of a standing person in a red top and ripped jeans.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Roaring lion on a forearm

Neo-trad · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A roaring lion's head fills the forearm, with its mouth open to show teeth and a pink tongue, and its mane drawn in loose, sketchy strokes. The linework is dark and textured, with orange, yellow, pink and teal washes spreading through the mane and behind the head. The forearm is shown against a graffiti wall and a paved street, with the wearer's torso and jeans in the background.

Neo-trad Forearm Lion Lion head Mane Roar

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Rain had been coming off the harbour since dawn, and by noon the fish market on Bellwether Quay had turned into a slurry of scales and wet cardboard. Nell Ardagh stood under her father's awning, hauling a tarpaulin tight over the eel crates, when she saw Tobias Vane come up the steps with his paint box held against his chest like a loaf.

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He painted on anything that would hold still: shutters, lorry doors, the bows of fishing boats drawn up to dry. Last winter he had put a lion across the chandlery shutter, its mane loose and smudged, its jaws wide enough to swallow the lamp above it. Nobody had asked him to. Mrs Pargeter paid him in tea and a pair of rubber boots two sizes too big, and he wore them all spring.

Nell found him at the chandlery that afternoon, sheltering under the eaves and staring at the shutter. The rain had got into the wet paint. Orange had run down the lion's cheek in a long tear, teal had pooled in the gutter, and the pink of its tongue had faded to the colour of a cut lip. Half the mane was gone to the cobbles. "It's ruined," she said. He shrugged, wiping his fingers on his trousers. "Rain only finishes what the paint started." He looked at the lion a while longer, then tipped his head at the street. "Still roaring, though, isn't it?"

It was. Under the running colour, the open mouth still shouted at the wet, empty quay, and somewhere behind it the teal kept draining into the drain, bright and unhurried, as if the lion had decided the rain was his to share.