Black and grey realism tattoo of a lion head with two roses and swirling ribbon lines on a person's hip and thigh.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lion and roses on a hip and thigh

Realism · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A lion's head in profile is shown with a detailed mane, with a rose above and another rose below, linked by swirling ribbon lines. The lion and roses use fine shading and soft grey gradients, with strong contrast in the darkest areas of the mane and rose petals. The photograph is taken from the side at close range against a dark background, with the subject's hands holding the waistband area.

Realism Thigh Lion Rose Ribbon Swirl Mane

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lion would take meat from no hand but Ruth Calloway's, and only after she had laid a rose across the bars of his cage, so when the autumn fair pitched on the common above Hebden Bridge, the lads who ran the coconut shies came up to watch her do it every evening at six. She bought the roses from a florist in Todmorden, two a day, one cream and one blush, and tied each stem with a length of green ribbon she unwound from a tin that had once held shortbread. Absalom would sniff the blooms, then the ribbon, then her wrist, and only then would he eat.

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Ned Pollard, who owned the fair and the lion both, reckoned the animal was too old to be worth the feed. He had a letter from a zoo in Leeds offering forty pounds and a crate, and he wanted the thing gone before the frost. Ruth said nothing. She went on buying roses with money from the gingerbread stall, and on the last night before the crate came, the wind got up off the moors and tore the canvas loose from the big top.

In the morning the cage door stood open and the lion was gone. The fair went searching with lanterns and found him at last by the dead fire, lying with his great head on his paws. Beside him in the wet grass lay the two roses, petals gone brown at the edges, and the ribbon had been wound round his foreleg twice and knotted with a sailor's care. Ned lifted the lantern to see better, and Ruth stepped past him and knelt down with the meat in her hand.

The zoo never got its lion. Ned had the crate burned for kindling that winter, and every spring after, a florist in Todmorden set aside two roses without being asked.