Watercolour painting of a lion's head framed by pastel roses and green leaves, drawn as a tattoo design on a spiral sketchbook page.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Watercolour lion with roses design

Botanical · Colour · Flash

A lion's head faces three-quarters towards the viewer, with brown and amber fur, pale eyes and a white muzzle. Its mane flows into blue, teal and lilac tones and is wrapped in pink and peach roses with dark green leaves. The painting uses soft watercolour washes with fine darker lines for the features, and the circular composition sits centred on a white sketchbook page.

Botanical Lion Rose Leaves Mane Watercolour

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

By the time the lamps are lit on the walls of Tessar, your hands are stained blue to the wrist and the master's roses are drooping in their clay pots. Nobody waters them now that the dye-vats have been moved to the east gate, so you carry the last bucket up the steps yourself. The lion is already there, lying in the shadow of the cistern house with its chin on its paws, watching the river as if it owed the water money.

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It has come for three nights now. Its mane is clotted with indigo from the cloth carts it brushed past in the market, blue and teal at the crown and fading to lilac where the sun has bleached it, and at its throat the fur is pale as the salt crust on the cistern stones. It does not growl at you. It only lifts its heavy head when you pour, and follows the water with eyes the colour of old pewter. Where the water soaks into the earth, the roses lift their heads. The peach ones open first, then the pink, and the dark green leaves unfurl along the wall as though someone were writing on it.

On the fourth night the master comes up the steps with a lamp and a merchant's order for a wedding. He stops when he sees the lion has lain down in the bed, flattened the stems and fallen asleep with a crown of pink roses caught in its mane. You wait for him to shout. Instead he sets the lamp down and says roses are only worth anything while they are still growing, then goes back down without cutting a single one.

In the morning the bed is empty, the stems are straight again, and a trail of blue petals leads down to the river. You follow it as far as the reeds. Somewhere beyond them the lion is walking off with the garden in its mane, and the cloth merchant will have to find his flowers somewhere else.