Black and grey lion face tattoo with loose ink splatter on the calf of a leg, in a realistic style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lion face tattoo on a lower leg

Realism · Calf · Black and grey · Photo

A detailed lion face sits front-on, with its eyes, nose and mane drawn in dark shading and fine strokes. Loose ink splatter spreads outward from the mane and below the chin, softening the edges of the design. The image is shown in black and grey against a dim background, with the tattoo centred on the lower leg.

Realism Calf Lion Mane

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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

The ink was meant for the parish boundary post, a rotten oak stump at the edge of Tansley Wood that nobody had repainted since the old squire died. Edda Morrow knelt in the wet bracken with a tin of lamp black and a cracked brush, scraping flakes from the wood, when the wind knocked the tin over. The ink ran across her knuckles and soaked into the moss in a dark bloom she could not wipe away.

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Something moved between the birch trunks. It was a lion, though not the gilded one painted on the Red Lion's sign in the village. This one was thin and grey, with a mane that shed ink like soot from a chimney, and its eyes were the pale blue of skimmed milk. It did not roar. 'You have spilt my mane,' it said, in the tone of a man who has lost his umbrella. 'The wood cannot hold a face without one. Finish what you started.'

So Edda painted. She drew the broad nose on the post and the heavy brows above it, and where the ink ran off the brush she let it fall, flecking the wood and the moss below the chin. By dusk the stump wore a lion's face, and the lion had gone back into the trees.

In the morning the carter found the post and took the news to the Red Lion, where it was argued over pints for a week. The boundary had moved, some said. Others swore the lion had asked for something. Edda kept her blackened fingers in her pockets. Each night, when she walked past the wood, the splatter around the post had crept a little further into the moss, and the bracken beneath it had grown dark as a closed eye.