Black ink line drawing of a lion head with a mandala-style pattern filling the mane and face, drawn on plain paper as a tattoo design.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Mandala lion head line drawing

Geometric · Black and grey · Flash

A lion head in profile with an open mouth and a flowing mane, drawn in black ink on cream paper. The mane and face are filled with ornamental mandala patterns, including a flower motif above the eye, triangles, scallops and concentric shapes. The linework is even and uniform, with stippled dots on the muzzle, and the composition fills the sheet with the head angled to the right.

Geometric Lion Mandala Mane Flower Geometric pattern Lion head

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The drawing had been pinned above Mr Hollis's barber chair since the summer the coal lorries stopped coming up Pellow Street, and nobody in our town could say who had made it. It showed a lion turning its head to the right, mouth open as if it had just remembered something, and its mane was not hair at all but rows of ink scallops and triangles stacked like the teeth of a comb, with a flower sitting over one eye. My brother Dennis said it looked like a church window that had been fed through a sewing machine.

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I was twelve and spent my Saturdays sweeping clippings off the lino, so I had plenty of time to stare at it. One afternoon I took a pencil and tried to follow a single line through the mane from the nose to the tail. Every path I tried curled round and came back to where I had started. Mr Hollis, watching me over his spectacles, said the man who drew it never lifted his pen, so it was one unbroken line from start to finish. He said it was a whole life drawn out without a break, and he would know, having kept three dogs and a wife.

The Thursday Dennis caught the bus to Leeds, I sat in the chair myself with a towel round my neck. Mr Hollis asked what I wanted doing, and I pointed up at the lion. He laughed until he had to put the scissors down, then said that was a job for a proper pen and a steadier hand than his. When he finally swept the last hair away, I looked in the mirror and saw the lion over my shoulder, still turning towards the door, its open mouth set on whoever came in next.