Black and white line drawing of a lion's face framed by a mane of flowers and leaves, in a detailed botanical style, shown as a design with no body placement.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lion head with a floral mane

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

The drawing shows a front-facing lion's head with calm, direct eyes and a defined nose and mouth. The face is rendered with fine hatched and stippled linework, while the mane is built from layered flowers, ferns and leaves. The image is monochrome on a plain white background and centred with even margins.

Botanical Fine line Lion Flower Leaves Fern Mane Foliage

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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

Hold the tiller steady, Nell, and mind the willows, because the old lion is listening and he hates a crooked wake. You want the whole tale or only the bit about the mane? Then sit on the coal sacks and keep your hands out of the water.

Keep reading

Every spring the lion came down from the Chiltern hills to drink at the lock below Marlow, and every spring he came with a little more of the wood on his head. Bluebell first, then foxglove, then the pale trumpets of lilies that grow where the reeds give up. The lock keeper's wife swore he was a gardener in disguise. The bargee's boy swore he was only a lion who had slept too long in a hedge.

The truth, Nell, is that he could not bear the bare patch the flood had left. The river took the seed gardens of the old abbey one winter, the glasshouses and the apple walls and all, and the monks went off to Reading to beg. So the lion sat down in the mud and began to grow things on himself, fern by fern, because somebody had to keep the ground from forgetting what it was for.

When the monks came back in the autumn they found him still sitting there, calm as a lock gate, eyes on the water. They never did ask him to move. They planted the walls again and went round him, and he is there still, if you row out past the weir and don't shout. Now take the pole and push us off, before the lock keeper sees you have no licence for that dinghy.