Black and grey lion head tattoo across a man's upper back and shoulder, realistic on the left and geometric with dotwork shading on the right.

Half realistic, half geometric lion on shoulder

Dotwork · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A lion's head faces left, with a realistic left half showing the eye, mane and whiskers. The right half is split into angular geometric facets with stippled dotwork shading. The design is in black and grey and sits over the shoulder blade, centred in the frame.

Dotwork Geometric Realism Shoulder Back Lion Lion head Mane Whiskers

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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 fire wants feeding and so do you. Pass me that split ash. No, the thin end. Now hear me. Up past Hollin Wood, where the beeches give way to bracken, there lived a lion that a lightning-struck oak had cut clean down the middle.

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The left half kept its softness. It had an eye like wet slate and a mane that lifted in the wind off the ridge. The right half belonged to Mab Scarrow, the carpenter's daughter, who worked with a brass compass and a pot of soot. Wood would not take a curve on that side, so she gave it angles instead, sharp facets like a cut-glass bowl, and she pricked the shadows in with a thousand tiny dots, the way the rain pocks a pond. When she was done the lion asked her to finish him properly. She said she could not make him whole, only make him plain.

That autumn the valley flooded and the village climbed the ridge with their pots and their hens. They saw the soft face and wept, and they saw the hard face and bolted their doors. So the lion walked down each night to the mill pond and stood at the edge of it, looking at himself. The still water showed him exactly as he was, two faces and neither one lying, and by morning the pond had frozen over with a skin of white.

So when you go down past the stile tomorrow and some fool tells you a thing must be one thing or the other, you tell him about the pond. Mind the step. Goodnight.