Abstract. We continue to study the shape of the stable steady states of the so-called shadow limit of activator-inhibitor systems in two-dimensional domainswhere f and g satisfy the following: g ξ < 0, and there is a function (u, ξ). This class of reaction-diffusion systems includes the FitzHughNagumo system and a special case of the Gierer-Meinhardt system. In the author's previous paper "An instability criterion for activator-inhibitor systems in a two-dimensional ball " (J. Diff. Eq. 229 (2006), 494-508), we obtain a necessary condition about the profile of u on the boundary of the domain for a steady state (u, ξ) to be stable when the domain is a two-dimensional ball. In this paper, we give a necessary condition about the profile of u in the domain when the domain is a two-dimensional ball, annulus or rectangle. Roughly speaking, we show that if (u, ξ) is stable for some τ > 0, then the shape of u is like a boundary one-spike layer even if D u is not small.