Black fine line tattoo of a lion head in an abstract single line style, with dotwork shading on the muzzle, on an upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Single line lion head on an upper arm

Fine line · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A lion's head is drawn in a continuous black outline with loose, angular strokes that form the mane and face. Small stippled dots add shading to the muzzle, and a few extra straight lines cross the design. The ink is solid black on pale skin against a dark background, with the upper arm filling most of the frame.

Fine line Dotwork Upper arm Lion Lion head Mane Abstract Outline

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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 fire will only last another hour, and you will want to hear how the Lion of Greyhythe got its one line. Before the sea came over the flats, there was a woman called Orla Venn who mended the signal masts for the cargo guild. She could not sleep unless her hands were busy, so every night she drew on the backs of spent shipping manifests with a stylus that never once left the paper.

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The guild wanted her to chart the old fault lines beneath the harbour, and she refused, because the surveyors' lines were always broken, stopped and started like a man who lies. Instead she drew a lion. She began at the ear, let the pen run down the brow, round the ragged mane, over the sleeping muzzle and back again, never lifting once. Where her path crossed itself she simply went over, and the straight strokes she added afterwards were the spars of the masts she had mended, so the beast stood on its own rigging.

The guild men came for the manifests the morning the water reached the third step of the chapel. They found Orla at the window with the sheet unrolled across her knees, and they could not find where the line began or where it ended. A boy with ink on his cuffs tried to follow it with his finger and swore the paper was warm. They folded it and carried it down to the boats, and the lion went with them into the dark.

Some say the sea took the paper, and some say it sits in a locked drawer in the drowned guildhall. But if you are out on the flats at low tide and you look up, you will see a shape the wind has carved into the cliff, one unbroken edge of rock, a mane of stone and a long straight spar running through it. Mind your step. The lion is still hunting the line it never finished.