The location-based routing protocol has proven to be scalable and efficient in large wireless sensor networks with mobile sinks. A great challenge in location-based routing protocols is the design of scalable distributed location service that tracks the current locations of mobile sinks. Although various location services have been proposed in the literature, hierarchical-based location services have the significant advantage of high scalability. However, most of them depend on a global hierarchy of grids. A major disadvantage of this design is that high control overhead occurs when mobile sinks cross the boundaries of the top level grids. In this paper, we introduce Hierarchical Ring Location Service (HRLS) protocol, a practical distributed location service that provides sink location information in a scalable and distributed manner. In contrast to existing hierarchical-based location services, each sink in HRLS constructs its own hierarchy of grid rings distributively. To reduce the communication overhead of location update, sinks utilize the lazy update mechanism with their indirect location. Once a sensor node detects a target, it queries the location of a sink by sending request packets in eight directions. HRLS is evaluated through mathematical analysis and simulations. Compared with a well-known hierarchical-based location service, our results show that HRLS provides a more scalable and efficient distributed location service in scenarios with various network size, sink mobility and increasing number of source nodes.