Black and grey lion head tattoo wearing a crown of pink roses and peonies, on the inner forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lion head with roses on a forearm

Neo-trad · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A lion's head faces forward, with its mane drawn in fine dark linework and soft shading. Pink roses and other pink blooms with green leaves sit across the top of the head like a crown. The lion is shaded in grey while the flowers carry the colour, and the design fills the frame of a forearm against a blurred background.

Neo-trad Botanical Forearm Lion Rose Flower Mane Leaves

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

The biscuit tin arrived on the 4.12 from Leeds, wedged between a pushchair and a man asleep with his mouth open. Nobody claimed it. I keep lost property at Carrick Road, so the tin came to my counter, and I opened it on a Tuesday while the kettle ticked as it cooled.

Keep reading

Inside was a sheet of tracing paper folded in four. Under it lay a lion's head drawn in pencil, its mane feathered in fine, careful strokes, with roses laid across its brow as if someone had crowned it for a parade. Beneath the drawing, a dozen pressed pink petals, each one labelled in neat capitals with a platform number and a date. Platform 3, 14 March. Platform 1, 2 May. Nothing else.

I spent the week asking the porters. Dev on the barriers remembered a woman who sat on Platform 3 every Thursday for a year, sketching the pigeons and never once catching a train. She stopped coming the spring the line flooded at Hollins Bridge. Nobody knew her name. The stationmaster said the tin had been left in the waiting room, and we had filed it under nothing, because nothing was what it claimed to be.

On Thursday I carried the lion to Platform 3 and propped it on the bench where the afternoon sun falls first. A girl in a school blazer sat down beside it, studied the roses, and asked whether they were real. I told her they had been pressed, and that they had waited a long time to be looked at. The 4.12 pulled in with a sigh of brakes, and she stayed exactly where she was.