Geometric lion head design in blue tones with a triangular grid overlay and halftone shading, shown as a standalone drawing on a white background with no body placement.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Geometric lion head in blue

Geometric · Colour · Flash

A lion's head faces forward, with a full mane that fades into fine strands at the edges. The face is drawn with dense linework and stippled halftone dots, and a white hexagonal and triangular grid runs down the left side of the image. The lion is filled with blue gradient tones that shift from deep teal to pale turquoise, set against a plain light grey to white background.

Geometric Lion Mane Lion head Geometric pattern Triangle Hexagon Grid

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Brother Anselm had the cloister floor in his keeping for nineteen winters, and the lion was the only thing in it he never got right. Every tile he laid was a triangle or a hexagon, cut from pale Purbeck stone that the abbot's cart brought up from the coast, and every one sat square against its neighbour. The lion would not sit square. It came out of the grid the way breath comes out of a cold mouth, all mane and dust, so that at Compline I could never say where the beast ended and the floor began.

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Brother Ambrose, who was prior before my time and blind for the last ten years of it, used to say the lion was the soul straining against the rule. I thought that was a comfortable thing to say about a floor that had cracked twice under my hands. The village boy, Tobias, who came up on Thursdays to sweep the walks for a penny and a heel of bread, said only that the lion looked hungry. He was the one who lifted the loose hexagon by the well arch, because a dog had been worrying at it.

Beneath it was a second floor, older, laid in lime plaster and scratched with a compass point. A lion's face looked up at us, drawn in fine strokes, its mane fading into hair-thin lines at the edges. The muzzle was pricked with dots that someone had made by pressing a thumb into wet lime, dozens of them, patient as rain. Nobody had written a name beside it. The grid we had laid for nineteen years was only a lid someone had set down to keep the beast from walking out.

I did not lift the stones again. I set the hexagon back, leaving one tile out of the north walk, a grey patch the size of a hand. On feast days the low sun comes through the arch and falls across it, and for a moment the lion looks up through the gap at the vault, as if it has finally found the square it was waiting for.