Black tribal-style lion design stepping forward with a flowing, flame-like mane, drawn on a white background as a tattoo design.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tribal lion stepping forward

Black and grey · Flash

A lion is shown mid-stride in a bold tribal style, with its head turned to the side and a mane made of sweeping, flame-like black shapes. The linework is solid black with no shading, and the thick and thin strokes create patterned areas across the body and mane. The design is drawn on a plain white background with the lion filling most of the frame.

Lion Mane Paw Tribal pattern

Find an artist for this

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

The lion came down from the moor the winter the herring failed, and nobody in Gullhaven could say whose it was. It walked the harbour road at dusk with its head turned sideways, as if listening for a bell that had stopped ringing years before. Its mane burned up black off its shoulders in long curling tongues, and where its feet touched the wet stones they left prints as sharp as ink.

Keep reading

The fishermen threw stones at first. Hanna Pell, who mended nets on the slip, set a bucket of salted pollock at the foot of the wall and said nothing. The lion did not eat it. Instead it climbed the breakwater stair one heavy paw at a time and stood at the end, staring out past the boats to where the fog sat on the water like wool. Every night it did the same, and every night the fog came in a little thinner.

In February the Rennick boy failed to come home. His father rowed out in the dark and found nothing but his own lantern reflected back at him. On the third evening the lion came down from the wall, walked into the shallows up to its chest, and roared once over the water. The sound rolled out past the point and came back as an answer, a single bell somewhere in the murk. Hanna took the bell as a sign of the lion's bargain and began to light the lamps early.

The boy came in on the morning tide, cold and cursing, with a broken oar and a story about a seal. The lion was gone from the wall by then, leaving only its tarry prints drying on the steps. Gullhaven still calls that stretch of stone the Lion's Step. Nobody there is quite sure who asked for the lion to come, but every child on the quay knows to walk carefully past it when the fog is in.