Black and grey geometric lioness face tattoo with dotwork shading and a lotus-style crown, shown on the inner forearm from two angles.

Geometric lioness face on a forearm

Geometric · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A front-facing lioness head is drawn in clean black outline, with its face divided into angular geometric panels and a stylised lotus or mandala-like shape above the head. Dotwork stippling adds soft shading around the muzzle, cheeks and lower jaw, and the tattoo is shown in two side-by-side photographs of the same forearm. The image is entirely black and grey, with a plain grey background.

Geometric Dotwork Forearm Lion Big cat Face Mandala Lotus Geometric pattern Dotwork

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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 closer, the lot of you, and mind the stove, because the stove in this house has never once kept its temper. Where was I? Ah, yes. The pass. Three winters back the snow shut the road to Gallow Scar, and a woman came up it alone on a grey mare, carrying nothing but a brass lamp and a cloth bundle that moved when it pleased.

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She asked for a room at the top of the stair. Tobias Penrose, who never gave a bed to a stranger without a quarrel, gave her the one under the eaves. Every night she sat at the window and drew on the frosted glass with a stick of charcoal, the same shape over and over: a lioness's head, its brow cut into panels like a loaf sliced thin, and above it a lotus opening over the forehead. She filled the panels with dots, hundreds of them, each one placed like a bead on a rosary. Her hand never shook. Penrose said that was the unnatural part.

Then in February the wolves came down off the fells, and the bundle turned out to be a cub, pale as milk, that they had followed all the way from the valley. The woman stood in the yard with the lamp raised high. Penrose told her she was mad. She said the lotus only opens in the dark, and whoever holds the light between the lioness's eyes can make the dark do their bidding. She struck a match. The wolves stopped at the gate, staring into those two small flames as though they had seen their own mothers there.

In the morning the snow was gone and so was she, the mare and the lamp with her. But on the lintel above the inn door, in soot as fine as dust, was that same face, and its eyes were open. Mind it on your way out, and don't you dare touch it.