A colourful lion head tattoo in pink, orange, purple and teal with splashes of paint, placed on a person's chest.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Watercolour lion on chest

Chest · Colour · Photo

A lion's head faces forward, its eyes, nose and whiskers drawn with defined dark lines and shading. Its mane and the surrounding area dissolve into loose splashes and washes of pink, orange, purple, teal and black. The design is centred on the upper chest and fills most of the frame, with bare skin and a plain pale wall visible around it.

Chest Lion Mane Paint splash Big cat

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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

Sit down by the ovens, you're letting the cold in, and mind the trays. You want to know why old Marsh Tanner painted a lion over the bread shelf? Because the lion was already there, asleep somewhere in the plaster, and Marsh only gave him his colours.

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Marsh came to the bakery in Hebden Bridge the winter his wife left for the coast, with nothing but a rolling pin and a tin of paints scraped from the dye works. Every night before the bakers rose, he sat on an upturned crate and threw colour at the wall. Pink for her cardigan, orange for the sunrises he'd slept through, purple for the bruises on his knuckles from the docks, teal for the sea she'd gone to. He splashed and he swore, and the paint ran down the plaster like rain.

Nobody believed him when he said a lion had come out of the mess. But the flour dust settled on the mane, the dark lines he drew around the eyes dried as sharp as a surveyor's pencil, and on the morning the first tray of cobs came out, those amber eyes were looking straight at the till. Marsh swore the whiskers twitched. He said the lion had only been waiting for someone to stop trying to paint him perfect.

Marsh is up the hill now, and the shop sells sourdough to people who never heard any of this. But if you're here at four with your hands in the dough, look up. The orange has faded to a blush and the purple has gone grey at the edges, yet there he is, breathing out the warmth of the ovens. Mind your step. Your loaf is ready.