Black ink drawing of a lion's head in an ornate, patterned style with a detailed mane, suited to a tattoo design.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornamental lion head line drawing

Geometric · Black and grey · Flash

A frontal lion's head is drawn in black ink on a white background, with the face and mane filled with dense, symmetrical ornamental patterns. The linework combines fine hatched lines, scrolls, dots and solid black shapes to build the features and the layered mane. The image is entirely black and white and is centred with even margins, with no body or skin visible.

Geometric Lion Mane Ornamental pattern Mandala Scroll Face

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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

Nobody at the reunion knew that the lion on the old gates had been drawn by hand before it was cast, because nobody else had been there when Mr Pryce pinned my A2 sheet beside his master drawing. We were in the sports hall of St Aldhelm's now, under a paper banner, with sausage rolls going cold on the trestles where we had once sat our mock exams. Dean Carrow, who had been asked to leave in Year Nine over something involving the bins, came across holding a paper plate and asked whether the gates were still standing.

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They weren't. The site had become flats and the iron had gone to a yard somewhere near Stoke. I told him, and he looked properly sorry, which surprised me. He said his dad used to take him to see that lion every Sunday after the match, because it was the only thing in town that looked like it was guarding something.

In the autumn of 1996 Pryce gave us black ink, a board and three weeks. Fill the lion until nothing is empty, he said. I gave mine scrolls down the cheeks, dots for the eyes and a mane so layered my hand cramped for a fortnight. He kept my sheet in his desk drawer for years, I found out later, and that was the part I could not say to Dean without sounding soft.

Dean took the biro from my hand and sketched a rough mane on a napkin, pressing too hard. He got the number of tufts wrong, and I told him so. He grinned and said it was the first time anyone had corrected him since leaving school. We sat there doing the whiskers until the caretaker started stacking chairs around us and switching off the lights one bank at a time.