Leo lion head with script on paper

Fine line · Black and grey · Flash

A black ink drawing on white paper shows a lion's head in profile facing right, with a sweeping mane of bold tapered strokes and a curled tail at the left. The word Leo is written in flowing script beneath the tail, with a looped descender on the L-like letter. The linework is solid black with no shading or colour, and the design is centred on the page with a loose sketch border.

Fine line Lion Script Mane Tail

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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 cable under your feet, it still hums when the hab turns. My grandmother's grandmother told this one, and she had it from a woman who kept the archive on Deck Nine, where the paper books were. Paper, mind. Nobody makes paper now. There was a lion on one of those pages, drawn in black ink by a hand that pressed hard, so the strokes went thick at the bottom and thinned to nothing at the tips, like flames going out.

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The old people called him Leo, and they said his mane was a fan of stars that only showed when the ship went dark and quiet. The artist had turned his head to the right, looking ahead, as if he had somewhere to be. Beneath his curled tail someone had written his name in a looping hand, and the L dropped a long tail of its own, straight down like a plumb line into the nothing. The keeper used to trace it with one finger on the reader when the lights dimmed.

One night the air scrubbers failed on Deck Nine, and she went down with a lamp and a bundle of ration cards, because the books were older than the air and she would not leave them to rot. Behind a loose panel she found the old drawing pinned up, and beside it a note in a child's careful writing: Do not let him sleep. He keeps the dark off.

She lit the lamp under the lion's chin and sat with her back to the cold wall, humming the way her mother had, until the scrubbers coughed and came back to life an hour later. Nobody ever asked her why the lamp was still burning when they found her. They only saw the pages open, and the black lion looking out over them, awake.