Black ink flash design of a lion skull with a windswept mane, dotted accents and leaves beneath, with the word Leo and a short line of text below.

Lion skull with flowing mane and leaves

Fine line · Black and grey · Flash

A fine ink drawing of a lion skull with an open jaw, surrounded by flowing wavy hair-like lines, curling leaves and dotted motifs. The linework is fine and detailed, with hatching and stippled shading on the skull and a few grey tones on the bone. The design is black and white on a plain background, with the word Leo and a two-line quote set beneath the artwork.

Fine line Dotwork Lion Skull Mane Leaves Dot Hair

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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 skull is the last thing on the list because nobody wants to be the one who writes it down. You find it in the drowned annexe on Level Four, where the water rose through the lift shafts two winters back and turned the card index to grey porridge. The crate lid has warped, but someone has painted the word LEO on it in white, and beneath the name, a line the damp has half eaten: not all things have significance.

Keep reading

Your colleague Okonedo calls down the stairwell, torch swinging, and tells you to tag it and move on. The lion is bone-white, its jaw dropped open as if it has just finished a sentence, and caught in the ridges of its brow is a tangle of dry grass fibres that still curls, wavy and stubborn, like hair under a current. Somebody has tucked pressed fern leaves into the crate with it. You kneel in the wet and feel ridiculous for wanting to hear what it was going to say.

So you do the unnecessary thing. You open the ledgers nobody reads, the ones with dotted marginalia where a long-dead keeper ticked off the forgotten: a brass key, a cracked lantern, a child's shoe with no pair. Each entry is a small dot of ink. By dusk you have forty-one dots and a suspicion that the list ends with the lion. You log the skull as significant, which is the frightening part, and your torch catches the open jaw, still waiting for you to finish the sentence.