Black geometric lion head tattoo with dotwork shading in the mane and face, placed on the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Geometric lion head on upper arm

Geometric · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A lion's head is drawn in bold black outline, built from angular facets and sharp, pointed sections for the mane. Dotted stippling appears across the forehead, cheeks and mane, adding texture to the otherwise open, unshaded areas. The design is done entirely in black ink on pale skin and fills the frame from the top of the image to the lower edge.

Geometric Dotwork Upper arm Lion Lion head Mane

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mirrell Oates had been cutting triangles out of tin for thirty years when the harbourmaster asked her for a lion. He wanted it for the new lifeboat house door, and he wanted it to look as though the sea had argued with a saw. She told him a lion was a cat with too much hair, and that angles were the only honest way to draw fur, because fur was just light caught on edges. He laughed, paid for the brass, and gave her a fortnight.

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She worked at the bench above the chandlery, where the gulls could watch her through the skylight. She drew the head first, a square jaw and a brow of three points, then the mane as a fan of blades pointing down toward the water. Her grandson Tomas, nine and bored, asked her why the dots. She said the dots were where the lion was thinking, and the bare patches were where it had decided to be calm. He did not believe her, which she took as the right answer.

On the last night a squall came up the estuary, and the lifeboat was called out before the door was hung. Mirrell stood at the window counting the running lights past the breakwater, and she kept counting until she could count them all again coming back. When the boat returned at dawn with its crew soaked and shouting, the harbourmaster stood beneath the unhung frame and squinted at the metal. "It doesn't look like a lion," he said. Mirrell wiped salt from her spectacles. "No," she said. "It looks like something that has already been past the breakwater."