Pencil and red ink sketch of an ornate lion head wearing a crown, drawn as a tattoo design on paper, with no body placement shown.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lion head with crown, pencil design sketch

Neo-trad · Mixed · Flash

A detailed pencil sketch of a lion's head with a stylised crown and decorative floral and bead-like elements framing the mane. The linework is layered with fine shading and accented with red ink outlines, with dots and small ornaments scattered across the design. A pen and an orange pencil lie beside the paper, and a keyboard edge is visible in the corner.

Neo-trad Lion Crown Mane Sketch Design Floral Bead

Find an artist for this

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 lion had worn the crown at the Mill Street hall for nine winters, and nobody had ever seen him take it off. It was made of brass wire and river beads, and the red thread holding it on had gone grey at the knots. Each Saturday he came down from the balcony rail when the fiddler struck up, and he stamped twice on the boards before anyone else dared to move.

Keep reading

That was the year Nell Carrow, who kept the fiddler's bellows, stood up on the bench to see better and caught her heel in the bunting. She went down into the crowd and the lion caught her, and as he lifted her the crown tipped and let go. The beads ran across the floorboards like spilt rain. Every dancer who stooped to pick one up was made to keep it, the old women said, until the crown was whole again, and so the whole hall was stooping and grinning and pressing beads into one another's hands.

He did not roar. He walked the room on his hind legs, slow as a bishop, and asked each person for their bead back. Each one said no, and asked him for a dance instead. By midnight he had danced with the cooper, the parish clerk, two farmhands and a widow who led him by the paw like a boy. The fiddler played until his fingers bled.

When the hall emptied the crown was sitting on the bench beside Nell, pale and light, with only its wire left. The lion was gone from the rail. Nell kept the beads in a biscuit tin under her bed, and the next Saturday she sewed one into the hem of every dress in the hall, so that the floor would never again be quite as bare as it had been.