Black and grey realistic tattoo of a walking lion with a full mane on the upper arm and shoulder.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Walking lion on upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A realistic lion walks forward, facing the viewer, with a full, shaded mane framing its head. The fur and mane are rendered with soft, layered greys and fine detail, giving depth and a sense of light across the body. The tattoo is shown in black and grey, with the lion filling most of the frame against the plain skin of the arm and shoulder.

Realism Upper arm Lion Mane Big cat

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 lion had been aboard since Gravesend, in a crate lashed beneath the longboat, and by the fortieth day the whole crew had stopped pretending it was not ours to feed. Mr Pellow, the purser, kept its mutton in the back of the ledger. I was the cook, so I was the one who carried the bucket to the hatch and listened to it breathing in the dark.

Keep reading

Its keeper, a showman named Abel Crane, had gone over the side off the Azores with a fever and a bottle of gin still in his coat. Nobody argued when the captain said the beast was ours until the next port. The lion had the manner of a passenger who had paid his fare and expected to be carried. On the morning the Dorothea raised the Cape, it came up the companionway on its own, and the men at the pumps stepped back against the rail.

It walked the length of the deck with its head high, the mane stiff with salt and grey as the wake behind us, and it never once looked at any of us. It went down the gangway at Simon's Town as though the planks had been laid for it. Dockers scattered. A customs man dropped his pen and let it roll into the harbour.

I stayed aboard with the empty bucket. Later Pellow asked me where the cat had gone, and I told him the truth, that it had gone ahead to see what the town had to offer, and that a lion who walks forward like that has never needed telling the way.