Colourful watercolour-style lion head tattoo with purple, orange, green and blue splashes and paint drips on a calf.

Watercolour lion head on a calf

Calf · Colour · Photo

A lion's head faces forward and slightly to the side, with pale blue eyes and a dark nose. The linework is soft and broken, with the form built up from splashes of colour and runs of paint dripping down the lower part of the design. Purple, orange, green and blue dominate the piece, with the lion's mane fading into loose splatter at the edges against bare skin.

Calf Lion Lion head Watercolour splash

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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

Mrs Penhallow kept the boarding house at the top of Gull Steps, and she did not allow paint in the front parlour. So when the painter Tobias Quayle took the attic room in October, with his box of tins and his brushes wrapped in oilcloth, she gave him the back room over the scullery and told him the sea damp would ruin anything he left out.

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He painted anyway. Every evening he sat at the window with a jam jar of water and let the colours bleed into each other on a board: violet from the bruised sky, ochre from the cliff path, a green he bought from a chandler because he said it was the colour of the harbour wall at low tide. Nobody saw what he made of them. What they did see was the lion. It stood on the sill one morning, wet and shining, its mane spilling over the edge of the board, and its pale eyes looked out past the mackerel boats as if it had been waiting for the tide to turn.

The fishermen said it had come up out of the water. Mrs Penhallow said it had come out of a jar of rinse water that somebody had tipped down the sink. Both were wrong. When the rain came in from the west, the lion ran. Blue went down the glass in long threads, green pooled on the floorboards, and the purple from its mane soaked into the lodgers' coats on the hook. By the end of the week the whole house smelled of wet pigment and salt.

Tobias found the board empty on the Sunday, except for one drip that had stopped at the very edge, as though it had thought better of falling. He kept it, and never painted a lion again. Mrs Penhallow still says the rain on Gull Steps runs in colours, if you stand at the bottom of the lane and look up at the lit windows.