Black and grey pen sketch of a front-facing lion's head with a dark shaded patch over one eye, shown as a tattoo design without a placement on skin.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lion head sketch with shaded eye

Black and grey · Flash

A front-facing lion head is drawn in loose, sketchy pen linework, with a thick mane of short and long strokes framing the face. One side of the face, covering the eye and muzzle area, is filled with dense dark shading that contrasts with the lighter, open lines elsewhere. The image is entirely in black ink and grey tones against a plain white background.

Lion Mane Eye Sketch

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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

Nobody at Kirkgate market wanted the drawing at first. It came in a plastic wallet stuffed behind a box of dead batteries, and when the rain drove in under the awning on Thursday I pulled it out to see what the damp had done. A lion's head in pen on card, the mane scrubbed in with a hundred short strokes and the face left open and pale, except for one side, where somebody had gone over and over the eye until the paper shone like a bruise.

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The stallholder who sold it to me, Mr Dhillon, said the artist was a sign-writer's lad called Tomas who drew on the backs of pub menus and never finished anything but this. I asked why he'd blacked out the eye. Dhillon shrugged and said the lad told him a lion only needs one eye to see the weather coming, and the other he keeps for himself.

I pinned it above the till with a drawing pin and forgot it, the way you forget a thing that isn't yours to sell. Then in March a man came in out of the wet asking for a fine nib, and stood looking at the lion for a long time, his coat dripping onto my floor. He said he had drawn it himself in a flat above a chip shop, the winter before his brother went to Leeds and didn't come back for the funeral.

He didn't ask for it back. He took a pencil from the jar, laid a coin on the counter, and asked whether I'd sell him a second sheet of the same card. I said I would. Outside the rain kept on over the stalls, and the lion watched us both with its one clear eye.