Realistic black and grey lion tattoo with a roaring mouth and bared teeth covering the back of a hand and wrist.

Snarling lion across the back of a hand

Realism · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A photorealistic lion's head with its mouth open in a snarl, showing fangs and teeth, spans the back of the hand and up towards the wrist. The fur is rendered with fine, layered strokes and soft grey shading, with strong contrast in the dark interior of the mouth. The tattoo fills most of the frame against a plain, wrapped surface.

Realism Hand Lion Teeth Mane Roar

Find an artist for this

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

The boats came in on the ebb, and the men hauled them up the shingle at Skerrow before the light went. Old Tamsin Brack counted them from the wall every evening, and every evening there was one short of the number she had painted on the board at the harbour mouth. That spring it was the Gannet's cousin, a flat-bottomed yawl called the Reliance, and nobody had seen her since the gale off the Haddock Bank.

Keep reading

Her son Eli went looking. He took the small skiff out past the bell buoy with a loaf, a lamp and a coil of rope, and came back three days later with a face like grey slate and a tale nobody wanted to hear. He said there was a lion on the water. Not a lion of the sort in the parish book, but a great grey beast with a mane like weed, sitting on the swell where the Reliance had gone down, its jaws open wide enough to take a dory whole. Its teeth were the colour of old bone, and its roar had no sound to it, only a pressure that made the oars jump in their locks.

The village laughed at him, then stopped laughing when the next boat did not come home. They went out together that time, all seven of them, rowing in a line with their lanterns lit. Tamsin went too, in her black shawl, and sat in the stern. When the lion rose from the dark water she did not flinch. She stood up in the boat, looked it full in its snarling face, and said, quite plainly, "You've had your fill of our fathers. Leave the sons."

The beast closed its mouth. Then it sank, and the sea lay flat. Every boat came home that night, and the Reliance was found drifting in the morning, her hold dry and her nets still baited.