Black tribal-style lion head design on a white background, drawn as a flash sheet image with bold solid shapes and no body placement shown.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tribal lion head design

Blackwork · Black and grey · Flash

A solid black tribal lion head facing left, with a open mouth, swept mane and flowing curved shapes. The linework is bold and mostly solid black with negative white space defining the features. The design is shown in black on a plain white background with no skin visible.

Blackwork Lion Lion head Mane Tribal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lion came up the stairwell of Harrow Point the winter the lift broke for good, and nobody saw it come. Mrs Abebe on the eleventh floor swore she heard its breath on the landing, a sound like wet sheets being shaken out, but she was eighty-one and heard all sorts. What the council found the next morning was only a scorch of black paw prints across the concrete and a smell of wet fur by the bin store.

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The children were the ones who fed it. They left chips on the bottom step and a bowl of milk by the boiler room, and the lion ate the chips and left the milk, which the boys decided was a kind of manners. It grew sleek on bread crusts. Its mane spread wider each week, swept back over the walls of the stairwell in long curling strokes, until the painters who came to do the corridors said they could not paint over it without the paint going black.

In March the developers came with their clipboards and their plans for glass and balconies. Tomasz from flat forty stood in the car park and told them the lion would not be moved. They laughed, until the lion walked out through the front doors at dusk, slow and deliberate, its shoulders rolling, and stopped at the kerb with its jaws open toward the tall grey men. Nobody argued after that.

The plans were redrawn that summer with a small green garden where the bin store had been, and a black stone lion set in the middle of it, mouth open, mane flung back toward the sky. On wet evenings the children still leave chips on its plinth. The lion, they say, is still hungry, and still keeps the building up.