A black and grey lion head tattoo in a loose ink-splash style on the front of a man's lower leg, with a baby's foot in the foreground.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black ink lion head on a calf

Calf · Black and grey · Photo

A lion head with a full mane is shown in loose black ink, with soft wash-like shading, splatter marks and dark patches that blend into the mane. The tattoo sits on a hairy lower leg, and a small red line runs beside the design. The image is otherwise black and grey, with a baby's foot in the lower left corner.

Calf Lion Mane

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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

You have been told a lion is finished when its mane stops looking like smoke, and three masters told you this, and all three disagreed. The lime wall of the potter's yard in Memphis is still wet from the morning, and lime takes ink differently than papyrus, so you dip the brush once, shake it, and let the black bleed where it wants. Your apprentice Tefnakht holds the lamp and says nothing, which is his way of saying the brush is wrong.

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The lion was commissioned by a merchant from Thebes who wanted it painted on the prow of his new barge, and who paid in silver rings and a jar of cedar oil. He stood where you stand now and said a lion should look angry. You told him the angriest lions were the ones who did not bother to show their teeth. He laughed, then stopped laughing, and went off muttering about cheap painters from the river quarter.

So you splash the mane. Where the wash runs thin you let the plaster show through like pale fur over sunbaked ground, and where the ink pools you press the dark into the shoulder so the head seems to push out of the wall. Along the jaw you drag one red stroke of ochre down the flank, a single line the merchant will call a wound, and you will not correct him.

When the sun drops behind the granary, Tefnakht lowers the lamp and finally speaks. "He will not like it." You wipe the brush on your apron. "No. But he will remember it, which is more than he would have done for a neat one." The lion watches the yard from the wall, wet and black at the edges, already dry enough to be sold.