Black line drawing of a Japanese shishi lion with peonies and swirling waves, styled as a tattoo design on paper, with no body placement shown.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Japanese shishi lion with peonies and waves

Japanese · Black and grey · Flash

A black line drawing of a spotted Japanese shishi lion with a flowing, curled mane, shown mid-stride with clawed paws. Peony or lotus blooms and stylised wave and cloud swirls fill the background, and the lion's body is decorated with dot patterns. The linework is uniform and clean on a cream paper ground, with no shading or colour.

Japanese Botanical Lion Peony Lotus Wave Cloud Swirl

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ink had dried twice on the brush before Mr Okada stopped apologising and simply let the lion go. The paper was cream and thin, pinned to the workshop wall above the fish-scale tiles, and the animal on it had been drawn wrong three times already: too tame, too cross, too much like a dog. The old man wanted something that could frighten a flood. His granddaughter Sumi, who had spent a summer pulling weeds from the lotus pond, thought the lion should look like it was fighting the current.

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So they went down to the river at low tide. She sat on the wet stones with a sketchbook while he watched the waves break over the rocks, counting the curls the foam made before it dissolved. He told her shishi were never meant to be one animal. They came in pairs at the shrine gate, one mouth open and one closed, breath going in and breath going out. A painter who drew only the closed mouth was drawing half a guardian, and would be answered by half a flood.

Back at the bench she drew the lion with its paws planted on a cloud of spiral water and its mane streaming up into the peonies, dots scattered over its shoulders like river pebbles or the seeds in a lotus head. Okada looked for a long time, then pulled the lamp closer and said nothing, which from him was praise. He lifted the pen and added one thing: a single curl at the lion's forepaw, turning back toward the pond.

That spring the river rose over the lower fields, as it always did, and the house on the rise stayed dry. Sumi never learned whether the lion had done it or whether her grandfather had simply known where the water would go. She knew only that the drawing hung by the gate for eleven years, and that the curl at its paw had worn pale from hands touching it on the way out.