Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lion head with flowers in watercolour

Botanical · Mixed · Flash

A lion's head faces left in profile, with its mane rendered as loose feathered linework and red, pink and orange watercolour washes. Small white and blue flowers with thin black outlines sit among the mane and near the cheek. The drawing sits on cream textured paper with the subject centred and open space around the edges.

Botanical Fine line Lion Flower Mane Blossom Feather

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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

Sit closer, the wind off the moat has teeth tonight, and the old wall listens. You see the lion above the gatehouse? Stone face, nose worn to a nub by three hundred winters of rain. Nobody remembers who carved him. My grandmother said he turned his head every spring to look down at the village, and that was how you knew the thaw had come.

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The lord of Cressmoor Keep had no use for beasts that did nothing but stare. So when the garrison marched south and the great hall went quiet, the only soul left was a girl called Imelda Thorne, who climbed the hill each morning with a basket of seed packets from the apothecary in Lowe. She pressed them into the cracks of the walls, into the lion's shoulders, into the ragged mane where the mortar had crumbled away. Her fingers were always green, and her skirts always smelled of wet earth.

Years passed. Blossom came up white and blue, then red where the old iron had rusted into the stone, and the wind pulled feathers of petal loose and scattered them across the courtyard. Travellers swore the lion was growing a crown. Imelda only laughed and said the flowers were a debt. The lion had once kept her brother from the moat when he was small and foolish, and she meant to pay it back a little at a time.

When Imelda was old and the walls were older still, the village found her asleep at the foot of the gatehouse, a trowel in her lap and her face tipped up toward the stone. The lion was looking east, the way he always did, and petals had drifted round her boots like snow. Mind your step on the way down. Those flowers were never ours to pick. They belong to whoever keeps the lion company.