Graphite pencil drawing of a tattoo design showing a crowned lion, a wolf, roses, a sun, a dragon head and antlers, rendered in a realistic style with no body placement shown.

Crowned lion, wolf and dragon pencil design

Realism · Black and grey · Flash

A detailed graphite pencil drawing of a composite animal design, with a crowned lion at the top, a wolf with an arrow below it, and a dragon head at the lower left. Roses, a sun or orb and deer antlers fill the spaces around the animals, with faint construction lines still visible across the paper. The work is entirely black and grey, with soft shading and fine hatching built up across the composition.

Realism Lion Crown Wolf Rose Sun Dragon Antler Arrow

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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 wheel, the sun's only half gone and the road will keep you a while yet. You want the tale of the crown in the dust? My grandmother had it from a camel man who crossed the salt pans every spring, and he swore to every word, though he swore to most things.

Keep reading

There was a lion once who ruled the dry country from a throne of bleached stone. Nobody agrees who gave him his crown, only that it was pressed from old tin and that he wore it at noon, when the heat was worst, to show he did not fear it. One summer a wolf came up from the south with an arrow still standing in her flank, and a dragon crawled out of the cracked earth with smoke in his throat, and both of them wanted the one well. Out there, water was the only law. Whoever drank first owned the road.

They argued three days beside that well. The lion roared across the sand, the dragon answered with smoke, and the wolf sat on the rim with her ears flat, watching. On the fourth morning a stag came down off the ridge, already dead, its antlers snagged in the thorns, and the three of them stared at those branching horns until the shade had shifted a full hand's width. Then the lion lifted the crown from his head and set it on the well's lip. "Whoever wears this," he said, "carries the others to the coast when the rains come, or the sand takes us all." Nobody moved. Then the wolf pulled the arrow from her side, dropped it into the water, and walked off into the hills.

The camel man said the lion never took the crown back, and the dragon, who had no hands for it, never tried. Where the crown sat that day, the stones split open and roses came up through the crack, red as anything, and they have never once died in the dry season. Next time you pass that well, mind the roses. They are the only thing out there still keeping a promise.