Black and grey pencil drawing of a crowned lion with a cross above its head, holding a heart in its paw, in a realistic style.

Crowned lion holding a heart

Realism · Black and grey · Flash

A lion gazes forward with a full mane, wearing an ornate crown topped with a cross and radiating lines. Its front paw cradles a shaded heart at the bottom of the composition. The work uses soft pencil shading and fine hatching for the fur, with dark outlines around the crown and mane. It is drawn entirely in greys with no colour.

Realism Lion Crown Cross Heart Paw Mane

Find an artist for this

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 mason on Inish Vael had been dead eleven years when the council decided his lion had to come down off the harbour wall. Nobody on the island agreed on what it meant. My father said it was a king. Mrs Orr at the shop said it was a dog that had got above itself. I was the only one who had climbed the wall as a boy and seen the heart.

Keep reading

The heart was not stone like the rest. Old Tam had carved it from a scrap of Cornish granite he'd won at cards, and set it in the lion's forepaw so the paw seemed to cradle it, the way you'd hold a bird that had flown into the kitchen. The crown on the lion's head carried a small cross at its peak, and when the sun came off the sea at six in the morning, the rays cut into the stone as though someone had scratched the sky with a nail.

The council men came with a crane on the Tuesday. I stood at the bottom with my hands in my coat and watched the lion lift, slow and grey, the heart still held against its chest. Then the wire slipped, and for one stupid second the whole beast tipped and I was certain it would come down on the quay.

It didn't. It swung, caught, and settled back onto its plinth, a little crooked, with a chip gone from one ear. Nobody mentioned moving it again. I left the heart where it was, went home with the cold coming off the water, and slept better than I had in a month.