Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lion and woman with roses on a calf

Traditional · Calf · Colour · Photo

A lion's head with a full mane and open mouth rises behind the profile of a woman with flowing hair, with two pink roses and green leaves at the base. The design uses bold black outlines with solid fills and some shading in the mane and hair. Pink, red, green and yellow ink dominate the colour palette against the grey-green background of the photo.

Traditional Calf Lion Woman Rose Leaves Mane Profile

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

Sit down, the lot of you, and shift your chairs off the floor before the band comes back. Right. This is about the Palais on the front at Mablethorpe, the year the lion came in off the sea. Nobody saw him arrive. He just stood at the top of the back stairs one Saturday with his mane wet and the salt still on him, and Mrs Ada Finch, who kept the cloakroom and had never once been surprised by anything, said, "You'll want a ticket, then."

Keep reading

He paid in pennies he had fished out of the harbour. Every week after that he climbed those stairs, and every week Lena Dunn was waiting at the top with her red hair pinned up and a rose tucked behind one ear. She taught him the foxtrot. He taught her that a lion never hurries a turn. They went round the floor so slowly that the old men stopped their card game to watch, and the fiddler swore he played a half bar longer just for them.

Then the summer the council voted to pull the place down, the pair of them danced past midnight with the doors flung open to the sea. The band stopped. The lamps failed one by one. In the dark the lion's roar and her laughter came out together, and by morning there were two pink roses lying on the boards where they had stood, and nobody ever swept them up.

So if you ever dance on that floor, mind the roses.