Two hands with black and grey realism tattoos, a rose on one hand and a lion on the back of the other, with a man in a dark suit and white shirt.

Rose and lion on the hands

Realism · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A man in a dark suit and white shirt holds his hands at his chest, showing a shaded rose tattoo on the back of one hand and a lion tattoo on the other. Both designs use fine grey shading and soft highlights to give depth, with the lion's mane especially detailed. The image is almost entirely muted tones of black, grey and brown, and the hands fill the central part of the frame.

Realism Botanical Hand Rose Lion Hand Suit

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The snow had kept the lane shut for nine days when Marta Hollis found the lion's prints in the yard, each one as wide as a dinner plate and pressed deep into the drift beside the lambing shed. Her father had told her the big cats had gone from the hills before he was born. She stood with the bucket in her hand and listened to the ewes shifting inside, and she did not go back to the house for the rifle, because the ewes were not what the lion had come for.

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It was sitting at the gate when the moon came up, its mane furred white with frost and its eyes the colour of old brass. Marta had nothing to give it but the stew pot and the three lambs born in the cold week, and she thought of those and felt her throat close. Then she remembered the jar on the windowsill. All autumn she had kept a rose cutting in water there, a stubborn thing her mother had planted by the wall and never seen bloom. The stem had put out one bud in December, now the colour of dried blood, and she had been waiting for something worth it.

She walked out slowly and held the bloom up in the lantern light. The lion looked at the rose for a long time, then lowered its great head and took the stem between its teeth as gently as a dog carrying an egg. It laid the flower in the snow at her boots, breathed once over it, and went up the white slope into the dark without a sound.

In April the old rose by the wall came into leaf, and by June it had climbed the stones to the eaves, and Marta never once cut it back. Her father said it was a poor stock for a farm. She let him say so and went out each evening to check the gate, where the snow had long since melted and the frost had left no prints at all.