Lion head design with Leo script

Black and grey · Flash

The drawing shows a lion's head facing right, with a swept mane made of bold, tapering black strokes. The word Leo is written in a looping script beneath the mane. The linework is solid black ink on a plain off-white background, with no shading or added colour.

Lion Mane Script Zodiac

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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 lamp-check board by the cage has held the same brass tallies since Monday, and you are the one who must take them down before the night shift comes off. Instead you sit on an upturned crate with Mr Pryce's fountain pen, drawing a lion across the back of the wages sheet while rain comes sideways off the spoil heap. Your brother says lions are for banners, not for men who wear their boots to chapel. You keep drawing anyway.

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The mane is the difficult part. You want it to look as if it is moving against the wind that comes down the valley, so each stroke starts thick where the nib presses and tapers to nothing, the way coal dust thins on a clean collar. The face turns right, toward the road out of town, because that is where the new works are hiring. Under the chin you write LEO in a loop, the way your mother lettered the names on the jam jars, and you feel foolish for giving it a sign at all.

When the horn sounds, Pryce takes the sheet from your hand without a word and holds it up to the lamp. He studies the strokes a long while. Then he folds it in four and slides it into his breast pocket beside the photograph of his daughter, and says a lion like that is wasted on paper. Walk down with me tonight, he says, and show me where you would put it on the new lamp room door.

You follow him past the winding gear. Behind you the ink dries on the board, and the black mane catches the last of the light while the rain takes the rest of the sheet.