Greyscale lion head tattoo with pink flowers and leaves on a person's upper arm and shoulder, in a neo-traditional style.

Lion head with pink flowers on upper arm

Neo-trad · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A realistically shaded lion head faces forward, framed by a mane of fine hatched lines and a decorative ornate arch above. Pink five-petalled flowers and leaves wrap around the head, with a scalloped mandala-style border below. The lion is rendered in black and grey shading, while the flowers provide the only colour.

Neo-trad Realism Botanical Upper arm Shoulder Lion Lion head Mane Flower Leaves Mandala

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lion came to Hollin Farm in a borrowed horsebox the week before Christmas, and by the second week of January nobody had stopped staring at him. Dad said the travelling show owed the Pargeters for a winter's hay, and an old lion with bad teeth was the nearest thing to payment anyone could find. Mum said he would die in the barn and we would have to dig a hole in the frozen top field. He didn't die. He lay in the straw with his mane gone the colour of wet tea and watched us through the gap in the boards.

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I fed him. Before the school bus I broke the ice on the trough and carried mash across the yard, and each morning he got up a little slower and looked at me a little longer. Lyle, the keeper, a thin man who smelled of paraffin and liquorice, let me sit on an upturned bucket while he told me the lion's name was Sultan and that he had once been the finest animal in three counties. 'Sultan's not finished yet,' Lyle said. 'He's just cold.' He left a tin of pink enamel on the feed-room shelf, the kind we used for marking ewes, and a brush with a split handle.

I painted flowers on the frost-rimed boards of the barn door while the lion slept: five petals each, round as coins, with leaves that curled like cupped hands. I painted them badly and then a little better. On the third morning Sultan came to the door, pressed his great face against the gap, and breathed a cloud over my pink petals until they ran.

Lyle came for him in March, when the frost had gone off the top field and the hedges had started to green. The horsebox was reversed up to the gate. Sultan climbed the ramp slowly, pausing at the threshold with his tail held still, and then he was gone and the barn door was only wood again. Some of the flowers were still there under the paint, faint pink ghosts, and I left them where they were.