Colourful watercolour-style lion head tattoo on the upper arm, with an orange realistic half and a purple, teal and green galaxy-style half.

Watercolour lion on upper arm

Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A lion's head fills the upper arm, with its mane fading into brushstroke edges at the top. The left side is shaded in warm orange and brown with realistic detail around the eyes and nose, while the right side dissolves into purple, teal and green washes dotted with white specks like stars. Colour ink dominates the design, which is shown against plain skin and a white vest top.

Upper arm Lion Mane Galaxy Star Watercolour

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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

The sketchbook had been left on the bench under the clock at Thornbury Road, wedged between a folded timetable and a half-eaten pasty, and Gwen Pryce found it at twenty past one when she came round with the brush. She shouldn't have opened it. The lost property rules were clear about that. But the cover was soft with rain and the first page had already fallen open, and the lion on it made her stop sweeping.

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Half its face was the colour of a kitchen lamp, ochre and rust, with whiskers drawn so fine they looked like they might catch on the page. The other half had given up being a lion at all. Purple bled into teal, teal into green, and across it someone had flicked white paint like frost or like stars. Underneath, in soft pencil, were four words: For the one who keeps the last train. Nothing else.

Nobody claimed it. On Friday a lad from the signal box came in asking after a drawing, and when she turned the pages for him he went quiet at the lion. His nan, he said, used to call the far end of platform four the edge of the world, because the lights stopped there and the dark started. Gwen wrote his name in the ledger, then wrote it again beside the sketch, and he didn't argue.

She kept the book on the high shelf above the lost umbrellas, where the platform lamp reached it at an angle. At the last train of the night the white specks caught the light, and the lion seemed to be looking down the line, watching the dark come up the track the way it always did, and not minding in the slightest.