Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lion and lotus on a thigh

Botanical · Thigh · Mixed · Photo

A lion's head in profile faces left, with its mane sketched into swirling foliage and branches. Lotus and cherry blossom style flowers with petals and leaves fill the lower part of the design. The work is mainly thin outline with light grey shading, and the lotus has a soft pink tint. The tattoo sits on the side of the upper thigh, with the hip and underwear visible at the top of the frame.

Botanical Fine line Thigh Lion Lotus Flower Blossom Leaves Petal Branches

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Now sit yourself down, and mind the wet step, because the lion does not like a fidget and neither did Mrs Abernethy who kept him. That's the crate he came in, off the Lisbon boat, the year the fog never lifted from the mole. Nobody on the quay could say what it held until the lid split and a face looked out at them, all gold and disapproving.

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The girls at the chandlery called him Ottoline, though he was a he and had no patience for names. He lived in the walled garden behind the net lofts, where Mrs Abernethy grew lotus in a tin bath she'd carried up from the boatyard. Every evening the lion lay with his chin on the rim and watched the water, and every evening the branches came. First a twig caught in his mane, then a blossom, then the whole crown of him going to leaf, until the gulls stopped landing on the wall because there was no room left for them.

The trouble came in the spring the trawlers went out short. Men came to the garden with rope and talk of selling him to a travelling show up the coast. The lion did not roar. He only lowered his head so the blossoms fell across the gate, pink and then white, until the lane was carpeted and no cart could pass. The men stood in the petals up to their ankles, and one by one they took their caps off.

So the lion stayed, and the lotus bloomed in the tin bath, and the boats came home. If you go down to the mole at dusk, you'll still see the odd petal turning on the water, drifting out past the breakwater with nobody's leave needed. Mind your feet on that step now.