Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Winged lion and lotus design sketch

Neo-trad · Black and grey · Flash

A detailed pencil drawing of a lion's head in profile, with stylised feathered wings sweeping up and behind it. A large lotus or chrysanthemum-like flower with curling leaves sits at the base of the composition. The work uses fine graphite linework and soft shading on the mane and face, with no colour.

Neo-trad Lion Wing Feather Lotus Flower Sketch

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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

Mind the third step, it's loose, and don't look at the lift, it has opinions since the Jubilee. Right, where was I. Ah, the lion. Every block on the Calder Estate had a lion scratched or painted somewhere by children who'd been told not to, but on the landing of Ashgrove House there was one with real feathers on him, grey as a pigeon's back. Mrs Okafor's boy drew him on the lid of a pizza box in 1987, and the lion refused to be a plain cat, so the wings grew out of his mane and swept up behind his head like he was bored of walking.

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The lotus came later, up on the fourteenth-floor balcony in a tin bath that once held a Christmas tree. The council sprayed everything green that year, and still that flower pushed up out of the grit. Old Dennis watered it from a washing-up bowl every morning and told anyone who would stand still that the lion had asked for it. Nobody believed him, but nobody pulled it up either.

Then the developers came with their coloured drawings of glass towers and a girl from the surveyor's office, Priya, with a clipboard and muddy boots. She climbed all fourteen floors because the lift was out, found the lion, and sat down on the landing to catch her breath. She asked Dennis why a lion needed wings in a flat place like this. He said, so he can see over the car park. She wrote that down, and somehow the plans changed.

So if you go up tonight, count the floors on your fingers, and mind the step. The lion is the one looking away from the road, towards a sea he has never seen, which is the only direction a winged thing ever bothers to look.