Ink line drawing of a lion's head framed by chrysanthemums, daisies and leaves on white paper, shown as a tattoo design with no body placement visible.

Lion and flowers line drawing

Fine line · Black and grey · Flash

A pen drawing of a lion's head in profile, with its mane formed from flowers, leaves and curling stems. The linework is fine and even, with the blooms and foliage outlined and little shading. The drawing is in dark blue-black ink on white paper beside a pen and a glass of milk on a marbled surface.

Fine line Botanical Lion Flower Chrysanthemum Daisy Leaves Mane Sketch

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The last lion at Pellow's Travelling Circus had outlived three owners and a fire in Carlisle, and by the autumn the big top was patched with feed sacks and the lion's mane had gone thin and grey. Nell Pellow, nine years old and the only one who could add, kept the ledger because her uncle could not, and she decided the lion needed flowers.

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Each morning she walked the lane to the hedgerows and the cottage garden where old Mrs Tully let her cut what she liked. She brought back chrysanthemums, daisies from the verge, bramble leaves and long trailing stems of ivy, and she wove them into the mane while the lion sat with its head turned toward the light. The lion, which the men called Mercy because no one could remember why, never once shook them loose. Her grandmother had always said that a creature who wears what the fields give will be known by the fields, and Nell believed it the way she believed in sums.

In October a buyer came up from Leeds with a cart and a paper that said the animals were to be sold for their hides and their keep. He stood at the tent flap and looked at the lion, crowned and curling in blossom, and he was quiet for so long that Nell's uncle began to cough. Then the buyer took the poles and the striped awning and the wagon wheels, and he signed his name in her ledger beside the lion's line and walked away without it.

That night Nell laid a daisy on the lion's nose and wrote in the ledger, one lion, given back to the field, and she did not add a sum beneath it.