Black and grey geometric lion head tattoo with dotwork shading on the outer thigh.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Geometric lion head on a thigh

Geometric · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A lion's head faces forward with a full mane, drawn with dense dotwork shading in the face and fine black outlines. The mane and the area behind the head are built from sharp, faceted triangular panels that contrast with the softer, stippled fur. The tattoo is in black and grey ink and fills most of the frame against plain skin.

Geometric Dotwork Thigh Lion Lion head Mane Animal Geometric shape

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

Brother Anselm had been told the lion was finished, so he sat at the scriptorium window with the sheet pinned flat and tried to see what the abbot saw. The beast was meant for the chapter-house door, a carved thing in the old style, but the mason had died in the winter and left only a drawing, pricked with a compass point and crossed through in three places. Anselm had been asked to make it whole.

Keep reading

He worked by the grey light off the cloister garth, stippling the face one dot at a time with a pen cut from a goose quill. Each dot was a small decision about shadow. The eyes took him four days. He did not sleep well, and the bell for Lauds found him still bent over the muzzle, his fingers grey with ink to the second knuckle. Brother Tobias, who kept the accounts and held opinions about everything, came to say the abbot wanted the mane in hand by Candlemas.

The mane was the trouble. The mason had drawn it as a clutter of sharp facets, like shards of a broken lantern, and Anselm could not decide whether they were light or stone. He stood the sheet against the glass and the lines became a crown of ice, then a fan of cut crystal, then a flock of birds folding their wings. In the end he left the triangles hard-edged and let the dots gather only where the mane fell toward the ground, so the lion seemed to be climbing out of the page rather than standing on it.

When the abbot came to look, he said nothing for a long time. Then he asked whether the lion had been drawn from life. Anselm said he had never seen one. The abbot nodded, as though that were the correct answer, and touched the pricked outline with one finger, carefully, the way one touches a sleeping animal.