Black and grey realism tattoo of a roaring lion with a full mane across the upper arm and shoulder.

Roaring lion on upper arm and shoulder

Realism · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A large realistic lion head roars with its mouth open and teeth bared, shown in profile across the shoulder and upper arm. The mane is rendered with soft, feathered strands of dark and light grey shading that blend into the skin. The background is a blurred brick wall and the tattoo is the clear focus of the photograph.

Realism Shoulder Upper arm Lion Mane Roar Teeth Animal portrait

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Harry Lowe had the carving across his knees in the fish store when the skipper came down the ladder with a tin of linseed oil and no good news. The lion had been bolted to the bow of the Saint Brenda since she was launched at Beverley in 1961, grey-maned and open-jawed, and the North Sea had been working at it ever since. A crack now ran from its muzzle back into the mane, and the wood beneath the paint was soft as bread.

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"She'll not stand another winter on the Dogger," said Walt Garside, turning the head under the bulb. "But I'll not have her go to the breakers with nothing to show for it." Harry had been aboard eleven years and never heard the old man mention the figurehead except to curse the gulls that sat on it. Now he talked about it the way other men talked about their wives.

They spent three nights in the store. Harry stripped the paint back to bare grain and learned to feather the strands with a fine gouge, the way Walt did, so the mane seemed to ripple even under a still lamp. On the last night the old man took a penknife to the underside of the jaw and cut in the names of every crewman who had sailed her, small and square, nineteen of them, the last one Harry's own.

They refitted her at the next spring tide. When the lamp caught the open mouth and the bared teeth, a gull lifted off the mole and somewhere past the harbour wall the wind made a noise like a throat clearing itself. Walt laid his palm flat against the mane, the way you might steady a horse. "Still answers," he said, and went below to put the kettle on.