Black and grey dotwork lion head with a flowing mane and mandala behind it, tattooed on the upper thigh.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lion head with mandala on thigh

Dotwork · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A front-facing lion's head with a detailed mane fills most of the frame, with its eyes, nose and muzzle shaded in stippled dots and fine lines. A mandala-like pattern of arches, petals and dots radiates behind the head, and the mane tapers into ornamental lower points. The tattoo is entirely in black and grey ink on pale skin, shot straight on against a light background.

Dotwork Geometric Thigh Lion Lion head Mane Mandala Ornament Dot

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

You have been carving the lion for nine weeks, since the Ostrander cleared Gravesend with a hold full of salt cod and nobody aboard who had seen the Cape. The mane is the hard part. Every strand has to fall the way the wind would take it, and the wind off the Horn does not care for your chisel. Mr Pell brings you tea in a tin mug and watches over your shoulder without a word, which is how you know he is pleased.

Keep reading

At night, when the watch changes, you climb to the bowsprit with a lantern shuttered to a slit and count stars. Old Hollis taught you that the sky is a book of bearings if you learn to read its dots. So you stipple the lion's muzzle with the awl, one mark for each star you can name, and by the Equator the face is busier than the mane. Hollis said that was backwards. A lion, he told you, is a thing you can hold a hundred stars in and still not see the sea.

Off the Cape a squall takes the foremast, and Hollis goes over the side reaching for a loose line. The men recover his oilskin, not him. The owners want the figurehead gilded before Madras, and you refuse them. Instead you cut the last dots by daylight, two at each eye, and leave the arches of the mandala unfinished at the crown, where the carving stops mid-curl.

Madras is all white glare and the smell of tar and cardamom. When the riggers hoist the lion off the bow for repairs, you run your thumb over the dots and find them warm from the sun. You look up. The lion faces the open water as if it has been counting too, and you can still name nearly every star.