Purple stencil of a geometric lion with a mandala crown on skin, beside the matching black linework transfer design on paper.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lion and mandala stencil with geometric pendant

Geometric · Other · Black and grey · Flash

A lion's head with a flowing mane sits inside a circle, topped by a mandala-style crown and finished with a geometric pendant hanging from the base. The left panel shows the design as a purple stencil on skin, and the right panel shows the same design as black linework on transfer paper. The fine, even lines and the symmetrical composition are the main features, with no shading or colour fill.

Geometric Fine line Other Lion Mandala Circle Mane Pendant Geometric shape Stencil

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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

You are kneeling on the wet boards behind the Wonder Show wagon at Hadleigh Michaelmas Fair, pinning a sheet of tracing paper flat with your thumbs while the gulls shriek over the dodgems. The lion has to go up before the gates open at two. Dolores, who runs the fortune tent, wants her circle sign redone because the old one flaked off in the rain, and she has promised you a shilling a line.

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You trace the mane first, because the mane is where lions get away from you. Each strand is a single fine pass with the stylus, feathered at the tip like a fern, and the mandala crown above it is built from eight petals that must meet exactly or the whole thing looks drunk. You work with a rule and a pot of Indian ink, and the generator coughs every few minutes, which makes your hand jump. Twice you have to start a petal again.

Dolores comes out with two cups of stewed tea and studies the drawing over your shoulder for a long time without speaking. Then she taps the pendant at the base, the diamond hanging off the circle like a plumb line, and says her mother always hung one of those from the tent pole so the ground would stay level. You had thought it was decoration. You add a second diamond, shorter, beneath the first, and she nods.

When the sign goes up that afternoon, the lion looks down over the queue with its mouth shut and its eyes fixed on the far gate. The paper it was drawn on is folded in your coat pocket, still carrying the faint blue smell of the stencil. You keep it. Nobody else has ever asked you to draw something meant to outlast a single season.