Black ink tribal-style lion design with swirling linework and a flame-like tail, drawn on paper as a tattoo flash sketch.

Tribal lion with flame tail

Blackwork · Black and grey · Flash

A crouching, lion-like beast is drawn in solid black ink with bold tribal-style swirls, flame-shaped tufts and curling claws. The tail ends in a flame shape that curls up above the back. The design sits centred on a plain cream sheet of paper, with a spiral notebook edge visible in the top right corner.

Blackwork Lion Beast Flame Tail Swirl Claw

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Snow had sealed the lane to Hollin Farm for nine days when the ewes began to go from the top field. Agnes Crowther checked the gate latches each night and found them fastened, yet every morning there were fewer sheep and a long scorched groove in the frost where something had dragged itself uphill.

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Her son Tom wanted to sit up with the shotgun. Agnes told him no, that a thing which leaves burnt tracks in snow is not a thing you shoot at. On the tenth night she took a lantern and a tin of mutton fat and went to the wall at the edge of the field. She sat with her back against the cold stones until her teeth ached.

The beast came over the wall low, the way a cat crosses a yard, all shoulders and a mane of black tufts that curled like smoke from a fire that was not there. Its tail rose behind it, tipped with a flame that did not gutter in the wind. It crouched at the edge of the lantern light and looked at the tin, not at her. She pushed it across the snow. The beast pressed one clawed foot down and curled each toe as if it were writing its name.

In the morning the tin was empty and the groove led back up the hill. Tom found his mother asleep against the wall with frost on her eyelashes, and beside her the snow held a long curling mark like a signature. Tom counted the flock that spring. There were thirty-one ewes and one lamb with a black flame on its flank, and nobody at Hollin Farm ever asked where it had come from.