Pen sketch of a lion's head framed by lotus flowers and blossom sprigs, drawn as a tattoo design on cream paper with no body placement shown.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lion and lotus flower design sketch

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A pen drawing on cream paper shows a lion's head in profile, with a flowing mane that blends into loose flower heads and blossom branches. A large lotus bloom sits at the lower right, with petals and small loose flowers scattered around the composition. The work is done in fine hatched and stippled linework in a single blue-purple ink, with shading built up on the mane and petals.

Botanical Neo-trad Lion Lotus Flower Blossom Mane Petal Branch

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lift has been broken since March, so you take the stairs with the sketchbook under your arm, past the fox someone spray-painted on the twelfth-floor landing and a radio playing the football to nobody. Mrs Adeyemi's door is ajar. She calls out before you reach it that the blossom on her balcony has come out all at once, and the pigeons are already at it.

Keep reading

On the fourteenth floor the balcony is a jungle of washing-up bowls and tyres planted with whatever the Co-op had on the reduced shelf. The lotus is the problem. It lives in a bath she carried up from her cousin's house, and it has flowered three times this year, which she says is a sign and you say is the water heater Rashid rigged up in the flat below. You draw her a lion instead, because she wants something to stand guard over it.

You sit on an upturned crate and draw the lion's head with the blue biro you keep for things that won't be rubbed out. The mane comes first, and it will not behave. It keeps spilling into blossom, into petals, into the cherry branch that has pushed through the railings as though it has somewhere to be. By the time you reach the lotus at the bottom you have lost track of which parts are animal and which are plant, and Mrs Adeyemi, leaning on the glass, says that is exactly how it should be.

When you hand her the page she holds it up to the light from the stairwell and frowns at the lion's eye. Then she takes the biro out of your hand, adds one stipple beside the lotus, and tells you the pigeons can have the rest.