Roaring lion and lotus on an upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A roaring lion in profile fills the upper arm, with a detailed mane shaded in fine stippled and hatched linework. A lotus flower with a bud and a faint leaf sits beside the lion, drawn with lighter outlines and softer shading. The design is entirely black and grey, with strong contrast in the dark mane and a soft fade across the skin.

Realism Botanical Upper arm Lion Lotus Leaf Mane Roar

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ruth had been night porter at Halsey Road for nineteen years, and in all that time the lost property cupboard had never once given up anything that roared. Tonight it did. A tin box slid off the top shelf when the 22:14 went through, and inside, wrapped in last spring's local paper, was a brass bud no longer than her finger, green at the seams, its stem bent like a question mark.

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Nobody had claimed it. The luggage label on the lid said only "Platform four, Sunday" in pencil gone grey. She turned it over in the lamplight and thought of the stone lion above the old ticket hall arch, the one the Victorians had carved to frighten the navvies, its mouth open on a lotus no mason had ever explained. Ruth had always assumed the flower was a mistake, carved for some other railway altogether.

At half past two a man came in out of the rain asking for a box he could not properly describe. He turned his cap in his hands while he talked. He said a lion had lived in his mother's garden in Lagos and had gone quiet the year she died, and that the only thing left of it was a bud. Ruth set the tin on the counter. He opened it, touched the brass with one finger, and laughed once, a sound with no breath in it.

After he had gone, the station clock ticked over the empty platform. From the arch came a low sound like air dragged through teeth. Ruth told herself it was the wind in the ironwork. Then the next train slid in under the lamps, and when she looked up again the stone mouth was shut, and the lotus was blooming in the grey light as if it had never opened at all.