Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lion head in profile line drawing

Fine line · Black and grey · Flash

A lion's head in right-facing profile, drawn in fine black ink lines against a plain white background. The flowing mane is built from many loose, tapering strokes, while the face uses denser hatching around the eye, nose and muzzle to create shadow and form. The drawing is in black and white only, with the subject centred and the mane trailing down the left side of the page.

Fine line Lion Mane Portrait

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The mason's sons have already gone down to the harbour, and the wax tablet by the door still shows the line your master scratched before the summer fever took him: a lion's head turned to the right, its mane blown back like smoke. You are the one left with the chisel. Nobody in Miletus asked for a fountain with a lion on it, but the magistrate paid in advance, and a debt paid is a debt that must be worked off.

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You begin with the mane, because your master always said the mane was where a lion decided whether to be feared. Each hair must taper to nothing, the point lifting away as the stone gives under it. The face comes last. Around the eye you press harder, cutting shadow into the brow until it looks like a man squinting into noon. The muzzle you leave almost bare, a few scored lines for whiskers, because the old man said too much detail on a face makes a thing look like it is begging for something.

On the ninth evening the magistrate's steward comes to look and frowns at the mane. Too wild, he says, and wants it combed flat like the lions on the temple steps. You say nothing. When he has gone you take the finest point from your bag and cut one more stroke along the flank, a single hair longer than the rest, sweeping back toward the cistern. In the morning, if he asks, you will tell him it is the wind off the sea.

When the water is turned on it leaves the open jaws in a thin white rope and falls over the carved mane in a hundred separate threads, each one finding the groove you cut for it. The steward wipes his hands on his tunic and counts out the remainder in silver. You stay until the sun is high, watching the spray catch on that last long hair and hang there before it drops into the basin, and you do not tell anyone which stroke was yours.