Black ink drawing of an ornamental big cat face filled with dotwork, linework and geometric patterns, shown as a tattoo design.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornamental big cat face in black ink

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

A front-facing big cat face fills the frame, with heavy brow ridges, wide staring eyes and a broad nose. The face is built from fine hatching, stippled dots and rows of triangles, with decorative swirls across the forehead and cheeks. The drawing is entirely in black ink on a pale background, with no colour.

Dotwork Geometric Blackwork Big cat

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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

Sit closer, the wind up the pass has teeth tonight and it will want the warm places. You asked about the lion that walked the high road before the monastery bell was cast, so I will tell you what my grandmother told me, and she had it from a carter who swore on his mother's bones that he had looked it in the eye.

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The beast was not gold like the painted ones in the inn at Vellan. It was black and white as a page left out in the rain, every hair cut into lines so fine that a man could read the weather in them. Its brow was a shelf of stone. Its eyes did not blink. The carter said that when he stood in the snow below the cairn, the triangles across its cheeks seemed to turn, one after another, like the teeth of a mill wheel slowly finding their places, and that the dots on its nose were the marks of every traveller it had let pass.

He had a sack of salt fish and a debt to a man in the valley, and he meant to cross before the drifts closed. So he did what our people have always done. He set the fish on the flat stone and said the words his father taught him, which were not holy words but only the names of his three daughters, one after the other, and then he walked on without looking back.

The lion did not eat the fish. In the morning the stone was bare and there was a single feather of ink-black fur laid across the path, and the carter took it, and it is still in the chapel at the top of the pass, rolled inside the bell rope. So if you hear the bell ring when there is no wind, you know which name the beast is calling, and you had better be ready to say your own.