In our experience, lion and wolf tattoos are most popular in animal-spirited tattoos. Other wild animal tattoos are comparatively rare but they do turn heads if done right.
Here are a couple of them we did for our clients. They are 10 years apart, so you can imagine.
1. Wild Life Realism Tattoo on Back
This tattoo is special and very close to my heart. If I remember correctly, this is probably the first large tattoo we had made in my initial days of tattooing (2007-08). This is from the time when most of my Indian clients didn’t have the hang of tattoos as much as rest of the world. So people rarely made large tattoos on their bodies.
One of my dear friends who is a wildlife buff, volunteered for this tattoo. He is also a fitness freak and loves elephants as they symbolize power and strength. So for his tattoo we chose this concept of an elephant showing the lions who the boss is! The narrative here is that in wilderness even the king of the jungle, lions are afraid of mighty elephants. I really cherish the memories associated with this tattoo. My only regret is that we didn’t have good quality cameras in phones back then. Hence the image and video might not justify the detailing in this tattoo.
2. Coverup with Spine-chilling Gorilla Eyes
This is a special cover up tattoo which we did for a special client who visited us from Jamshedpur, Jharkhand. This is a customized gorilla tattoo. The client had previously inked his name on the calf and he wanted to change it into a gorilla tattoo. This dude is a weightlifter with a great personality and his demand actually made sense because gorillas are a symbol of power, strength and leadership.
We customized this specially into a Polka Trash Tattoo design featuring scary gorilla eyes in between. Polka Trash designs are very popular these days and are inked in Black and Red colours. These tattoos are famous for their clean and beautiful abstract designs. We spent 7-8 hours on this and the client was amazed by the outcome and really admired our hard work. He also planned a new tattoo with us which is to be done next year.
We have done plenty of lion, wolf and tiger tattoos
