Colourful watercolour-style lion head tattoo on the side of the ribs, with blue, pink and orange brushstrokes and splashes around it.

Watercolour lion head on the ribs

Ribs · Colour · Photo

A lion's head faces to the right, with amber-orange fur, dark eyes and a dark nose outlined in black. Loose blue, teal, pink, purple and red brushstrokes and splatters surround the head and extend across the skin. Colour dominates the design, and the soft edges of the washes contrast with the more defined eyes and nose.

Ribs Lion Lion head Paint splatter Brush stroke

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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

Mind the puddle, it's not water. That's Mrs Abernethy's blue from the dye works, and it has been trying to get into my boots since Tuesday. Sit down, sit down, and I'll tell you how the lion came out of the paint pots at Wexcombe fair.

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Old Tobias Quill painted signs for the coaching inns, and he had one commission nobody else would take. Lord Marlow wanted a lion for the gate of his new hunting lodge, painted so well the beast looked ready to step off the board. Tobias had no lions in him. He had only what he hauled about in his cart: madder red, cobalt, a teal he bought off a sailor who swore it came from the bottom of the Mediterranean, and a purple that smelled of violets and turpentine.

On the third night the cart went over on the forest road at the edge of the village, and every pot cracked open in the wet bracken. Tobias sat in the mess until dawn, cursing, and the colours ran together into the shape of something breathing. By morning there was a face in the brambles, amber where the sun caught it, with two dark eyes that looked straight through him and asked what he had been waiting for.

He painted that lion on a dry sheet of sailcloth, and it was so alive that Lord Marlow's hounds would not go near the gate. The lord paid him double and never once asked where the splashes on the lodge steps came from. Tobias never painted another lion. He said a man only gets one look like that in his life, and he had spent his on the gate.