Three-panel meme comparing a realistic black and grey roaring lion tattoo on the upper arm with a cheaper lion and a crude outlined cat head with red detail.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Three lion tattoos compared by price

Realism · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

The top left panel shows a roaring lion with detailed fur, teeth and shading in black and grey on an upper arm. The top right panel shows a softer, less defined lion head on what appears to be a thigh or upper arm, with less contrast. The bottom panel shows a rough, outlined roaring head with a red mouth area and a light blue-green tint around the eye, on a shoulder.

Realism Upper arm Shoulder Lion Roar Mane Cat

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cousin's kitchen smelled of hot wire and surgical spirit, which Teodoro decided was a good sign. Tomas had bought the machine from a man at the harbour who swore it came out of a proper studio in the city. Teodoro had sixty pounds, half a bottle of rum for courage, and a promise that the lion would roar.

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Tomas traced the design from a calendar page of a lion yawning over a rock. He ran out of black ink halfway through the mouth and finished it with red from his daughter's broken biro. The green pen was the only one left, so the eye came out blue-green and staring. The outline wobbled like a dog on a long lead, and the mouth looked less like a roar than a man who had just bitten a lemon.

Ramiro came round the next morning, the one who had paid a real artist a thousand pounds for a lion with fur you could practically stroke. He looked at Teodoro's shoulder for a long time, then laughed until he had to sit down on the step. Teodoro laughed too, because there was nothing else to do with a shoulder that looked like a child's drawing of a grievance.

Years later the thousand-pound lion had faded to a soft grey at the edges, and Ramiro was the one standing in the rain outside the bar at two in the morning with a split lip and three men in front of him. Teodoro pulled off his jacket and rolled up his sleeve. The ugly lion opened its red mouth in the streetlight, and the men decided they had somewhere else to be. Ramiro never laughed at it again.