Black ink drawing of a lion head in fine line style, framed by ornate paisley and mandala-like patterns, shown as a tattoo design sketch on paper.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornate lion head design on paper

Fine line · Black and grey · Flash

A lion's head in three-quarter view is surrounded by an elaborate mane of swirling paisley, scrolls and leaf-like ornament. The fine black linework uses fine hatching and stippling for the muzzle and eyes, with dense decorative filling in the mane. The design is drawn in black ink on a plain tan sheet, with no colour.

Fine line Lion Mane Paisley Mandala Scroll Leaves Floral ornament

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The frost had got into the lane again by six, so Mary Harker carried the lamp to the kitchen table and unrolled the sheet her grandson had left behind. He was sixteen and had been drawing since he could hold a pencil, and the lion on the paper looked past her shoulder as though something in the yard had caught its interest. Its face was turned three-quarters away, the whiskers fine as grass seed, and around it the mane rose and curled into paisley, scroll and leaf until she could hardly tell where the animal stopped and the ornament began.

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She knew where the pattern had come from. Her mother had carried a paisley shawl out of Kashmir in 1952, folded in a tin trunk with a wooden spoon and a letter nobody could read after the damp got in. Mary had grown up tracing its loops with her finger on the kitchen oilcloth, and now the same loops sat in her grandson's mane, pinned to the animal like a borrowed coat. He had drawn the lion in black ink on the brown paper from the feed merchant's, because it was cheap and because, he'd said, the lion should look like it had been left out in the weather for a hundred years.

He was leaving on Tuesday for a studio in Carlisle, where a man with a steady hand had agreed to look at his portfolio. Mary turned the sheet over. On the back, in pencil so faint she had to tilt it to the lamp, he had written a single line in his careful capitals: IT WILL KEEP. She pinned the drawing to the dresser above the coal scuttle, and when the stove caught, the curls of the mane threw small moving shadows across the wall, so that for a moment the old lion seemed to draw breath.