Colourful seated lion tattoo on the inner forearm, drawn in a bold stylised neo-trad style with orange, red and yellow tones.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Seated lion on a forearm

Neo-trad · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A seated lion faces the viewer with a full, flame-like mane, a broad muzzle and a long curled tail that sweeps down beside its front paws. The design uses smooth shaded fills in orange, red, yellow and deep maroon, with darker outlines defining the features and mane. The tattoo is centred on the forearm against a plain light background, with a patterned black and white sleeve visible on the left.

Neo-trad Forearm Lion Mane Tail Big cat

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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

Sit closer, the wind up here takes the good parts out of a story before they reach your ears. That's better. The lion came down the Kettle Pass the winter the snow shut the road to Holm Vale, and it came sitting on its haunches, as if someone had carried it up the slope and set it down to wait.

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Orla Brack kept three hundred ewes on the high grass that year, and she was the first to see it, a bright shape in the lee of the old cairn. Its mane caught the last of the sun so that the drovers below swore the hill was burning. Orla took her lantern up the track, expecting a fox or a wolf that had lost its nerve. The lion did not growl. It only turned its broad face towards her, lifted its curled tail from the snow and laid it neatly beside its front paws, the way a woman arranges her skirts before she sits down to tell you something difficult.

She shared her bread with it, the heel of a loaf and a flask of mutton broth gone cold. It ate without hurry. When the blizzard came over the ridge that night, Orla pressed her back to its warm flank and the two of them waited out the dark while the lamp guttered and the sheep huddled below. By morning the lion was gone, and the snow had melted in a ring where it had sat.

In March the crocuses came up there, orange and red and yellow, the colour of something that once burned and forgot how to stop. If you walk the Kettle Pass in spring, you'll find them still. Don't pick them. The lion might be watching, and it has never liked to be disturbed while it is keeping warm.