Black and grey geometric lion head inside a mandala tattoo on the outer forearm of a person in denim shorts.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Geometric lion in a mandala on a forearm

Geometric · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A geometric lion head is set within a circular mandala of fine ornamental linework on the forearm. The lion's face is built from angular facets with soft shading, and the surrounding mandala uses repeated petal and dot patterns. The tattoo is shown in black and grey, centred on the arm against a blurred indoor background.

Geometric Forearm Lion Mandala Lion head Ornamental Circle

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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, the lot of you, before the urn boils over and somebody else gets the last custard slice. I've been asked to tell the one about the lion, and I'll tell it once, so put your phones away.

Keep reading

Back in 1979 there was a lad called Dennis Pryce who drew on everything. Desks, bus shelters, the back of his mum's gas bill. The summer we left, he chalked a lion on the bike shed wall, and it wasn't a lion like a lion. It was built from angles, every facet the colour of wet slate, and round its mane he'd ringed a circle of petals and dots that went on so long the caretaker gave up scrubbing it off. Dennis said the lion was the sun wearing a face. Mr Kettering said he'd have him in detention until he was thirty.

Dennis went to the docks at Hull, then onto a ship that never came back in, which is the part nobody likes, so I'll skip it. What he left behind was a sketchbook, which his sister brought to me in the Co-op car park in a carrier bag. Every page was the same thing done again: the lion inside its mandala, a little sharper each time, until the last drawing had no mane at all, just the circle of petals turning round an empty face.

Last I heard, someone in Leeds had that final page copied out in a shop with a painted swallow on the window, and she said it was the only drawing she'd ever seen that looked like it was keeping watch. So there's your ending. Dennis never finished his lion, but it got finished on somebody in the end.