Hand-drawn tattoo design of a lion's head framed by sunflowers, hibiscus and other flowers in blue, purple, pink and orange wash, shown as a drawing on paper.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lion head with sunflowers and hibiscus

Botanical · Colour · Flash

A drawing of a lion's face at the centre, with its mane formed from sunflowers, blue and purple daisy-like blooms, and leaves. Large flowers, including a hibiscus-style bloom, fill the left and right edges. The fine dark ink linework is loosely shaded, with translucent watercolour or marker washes in blue, purple, pink, orange, yellow and green spread over the sheets.

Botanical Lion Sunflower Flower Hibiscus Leaves Daisy Mane

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody in Pinchbeck believed the lion had been wearing sunflowers, not at first, and Tom Gosling stopped arguing about it after the first summer. The travelling menagerie had folded in the spring, its caravans sold for scrap, and the lion, a big tired male called Marcus, was left behind in a glasshouse behind the vicarage with a padlock and a bucket of mutton fat. Tom was sixteen. He was the only one who would go in.

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Marcus would not eat unless something was looking at him. So Tom cut the heads from the sunflowers his mother grew along the dyke and tucked them into the thick ruff of the lion's mane, one by one, talking about the weather while the petals dropped on the tiles. By August the mane was a crown of yellow faces. Tom brought blue scabious from the verge, wild chicory, and purple asters from the churchyard wall, and Marcus, who had been a sour old thing, began to purr like a cart on gravel.

The trouble came in September, when a storm forced the glasshouse door open and the lion walked out past the bulb fields without a sound. The whole village went after him with lanterns and bread. They found him at dawn in the hibiscus hedge behind the Co-op, lying with his chin on his paws, and every flower he had carried was still in his mane, faded but whole. The men wanted him shot. Tom simply knelt in the wet grass and began picking out the dead heads.

They say the blooms came back that winter in the scrap of canvas Tom kept folded in his coat, painted over in the colours of every flower he had ever given the lion. He never cut a bloom for himself after that. Each morning he carried the sunflower heads through the glasshouse door, and each morning the old lion lifted his head to meet him, the petals running into his mane like rain into wet paper.