Black tribal-style lion head design with a roaring mouth, bared teeth and flowing mane lines on a white background.

Tribal lion head design

Blackwork · Black and grey · Flash

A bold black lion head shown front-on with its mouth open in a snarl, showing teeth and a fanged jaw. The mane is drawn with sweeping, tapered solid black shapes in a tribal style, with the eyes and brow shown as negative white space. The design is rendered in solid black ink on a plain white background with no shading or colour.

Blackwork Lion Lion head Mane Roar Teeth

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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 only warms the ones who sit near it. No, you there, with the wet sandals. Now listen. The lion painted on the gate of Harrow Dun was not always a lion. It was a goatherd's son named Osric, who sold bread to the temple cooks and cheated them by a finger's width on every loaf.

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Each morning the sun rose over the eastern wall, and the mane of the great beast that roamed the hills above the city caught the light the way oil catches a torch. People said the lion had been a king once, cursed by the gods for cutting down a sacred grove. People said many things. Osric laughed at all of them, until the night he climbed the hill with a sack of stolen grain and found the lion waiting on a flat rock, its jaw wide, every tooth as long as a finger.

He did not run. That was either his mistake or his only good sense. He set the sack down and said, 'I owe the grove a debt, and I will pay it in bread.' The lion closed its mouth. Its mane, black as pitch and streaming like smoke, parted for a moment and showed him a path down the far side of the hill, where a spring ran clear for the first time in a generation.

Osric baked for the temple for forty years after that, and he weighed every loaf true. When he died, the cooks carved a lion's face into the gate, mouth open, roaring at dishonest bakers. Go and look at it if you don't believe me. Check the weights in your own bag while you're there.