Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lion and lotus flower design sketch

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A pencil or ink drawing on cream paper shows a lion's head in profile, with its mane spilling into loose, flowing strands. Lotus blooms and small blossoms surround the head and trail down the left side of the composition. The work is monochrome, built from fine hatched and shaded linework with darker shading around the lion's face and the flower centres.

Botanical Lion Lotus Flower Blossom Mane

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dai had called the lion bad luck, and Nell told him that was the sort of thing deputies said to keep men from talking. She sat on the step of the Miners' Institute with her sketchbook on her knee and a pencil stub behind one ear, trying to get the mane right. Coke smoke rolled off the ovens and settled in her hair, so she gave up on neat lines and let the strands run loose, the way the wind ran over the tip.

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Thirty-one days since the cage stuck at Number Four. Nobody said the word bodies out loud, though everybody thought it. What the valley had instead was the women, who carried tea up the hill in dented flasks and asked nothing, and Mrs Pritchard's lotus in a tin bath on her back wall. Her husband had bought the bulb from a catalogue before the strike, and it came up every summer regardless of the slag heap. Nell had drawn it twice already, and both times she had put a lion's head above it without deciding to.

On the thirty-second morning a whistle went down the valley, long and then short, and the women dropped their flasks where they stood. Nell didn't run. She kept her pencil moving, the petals curling out from the lion's brow where the flowers had tangled, the hatching dark under the jaw. She had learned that if she kept drawing she could keep her hands steady.

When the blankets had been handed out and Mrs Pritchard had cried into her apron, Nell pinned the sketch to the noticeboard beside the names. Dai came in with coal still in the creases of his face, stopped, and looked for a long time at the lion with its eyes half shut and its mane full of blossom. "Didn't know you could make it look like it was sleeping," he said. She said she hadn't. She had only drawn it the way it looked from the hill, waiting for the cage to come up.