Two colour lion tattoos on forearms: a seated orange and yellow lion on the left, and a walking blue and purple lion on the right.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two stylised lions on forearms

Forearm · Colour · Photo

The image shows two side-by-side photographs of stylised lion tattoos on forearms. The left lion is seated and facing forward, with a flowing orange, yellow and red mane, a curled tail and clawed paws. The right lion walks forward in blue, teal and violet tones with a striped, ribbon-like mane. Both use bold flat shapes, soft airbrush-style gradients and strong outlines, with colour ink dominating.

Forearm Lion Mane Tail Paw Big cat

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lift has been broken since Tuesday, so you take the stairs with the bag of shopping swinging against your shin, counting the landings the way you count everything when you are bored. On the fourteenth landing the two lions are waiting, painted by the woman from flat 22 the summer before she moved to Margate. The orange one sits like a doorman with his paws squared off. The blue one walks out of the corner, mane gone to ribbons, as if he has somewhere better to be and is too polite to say so.

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Mrs Dhillon from flat 18 says the orange one is the day shift and the blue one is the night, and that the paint is the sort that goes soft when the wind comes off the car park. You ask which one is in charge. She laughs and says neither, they just take turns being looked at. You think about that all the way up to the eighteenth floor, where the bags go down on the mat and your arms feel like they belong to someone taller.

Next morning the stairwell smells of bleach. The council man has been through with a roller, and where the blue lion's tail should curl there is only grey primer. You stand on the landing with the milk in your hand and wait for something to happen, the way you wait for the lift. Nothing does. Then you notice the orange lion has been left alone, still sitting there with his paws neat and his mane burning, looking past you and down the stairs as though the wall ends at the bottom and the whole city is waiting beyond it.