Coloured drawing of a roaring lion head with a white rose and flowing green and yellow mane, with orange butterflies, on white paper.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lion head with rose and butterflies

Neo-trad · Colour · Flash

A coloured design drawing of a roaring lion's head in profile, with its mouth open and teeth showing. Its flowing mane is rendered in green, yellow and orange, with a white rose tucked into the mane and small orange butterflies scattered below. The lion's face uses grey shading and fine linework, while the mane and flowers are in bright, loose colour on a plain white sheet.

Neo-trad Lion Rose Butterfly Mane Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Brother Anselm had kept the herb beds at Saint Oswin's for thirty winters, and in all that time the lion had never once come past the gate. So when the lay-brother ran up the hill shouting that something yellow-maned was sitting on the wall above the orchard, Anselm put down his trowel and went to look, because he was too old to run.

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It was not a lion from the travelling menagerie, nor from any tale the novices told. Its mane spilled over the stones like river weed in spring, green at the roots and gold at the tips, and caught in it were small orange butterflies that did not fly off when the bell rang for Sext. The beast opened its jaws and roared, but the sound came out soft, the way a monk speaks during the hours of silence.

Anselm asked what it wanted. The lion looked at the bed of white roses he had planted for the abbot's funeral, the one that never quite bloomed, and then it looked at him. He understood. He cut the single rose that had finally opened that morning and held it up. The lion lowered its great head and let him tuck the flower into its mane, just behind the ear, where it stayed white against all that colour.

Afterwards the brothers said the lion went down the far side of the hill and the butterflies went with it, though Anselm only ever said that the roses flowered that year without any help from him. The rose bed bloomed for three summers after, and no one ever again asked the old gardener whether he had seen the beast.