Pencil sketch design of a woman with long flowing hair, a lion's head and two lotus flowers, drawn in teal ink on tan paper.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Woman and lion with lotus flowers sketch

Colour · Flash

A line drawing of a woman with long, flowing hair rising above a lion's head, with her arm draped over the lion's mane. Two lotus flowers sit beside the lion's face and below it, and the hair and mane trail downwards as loose strands. The design is drawn in a single teal ink with fine, sketched outlines and no shading, on a tan background.

Woman Lion Lotus Mane Sketch Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The menagerie lion came ashore at Saltcombe in the wet spring the breakwater cracked, chained to a cart nobody would drive past the quay. You were the only one who walked up to the bars with a bucket of mackerel heads, and the harbourmaster's clerk swore you'd be eaten before Michaelmas. Instead the animal learned your name before the gulls did.

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Your mother's hair had always been long enough to sit on, and yours grew to match it that summer, until the wind off the bay lifted it clean over your shoulders and out past the lighthouse rail. The lion, gone thin on the crossing, would push his great head under your arm whenever the wind took hold. Nobody else could stand near him without hearing the chain rattle, but you could sleep against his flank with a pale lotus pressed in your palm, the kind the fishermen traded from the Dutch boats for salt.

In October a ship brought word of a fire at the Plymouth menagerie, and a man in a grey coat came asking after his property. You walked him down to the quay with the lion padding beside you, its mane full of sea-wrack and dried petals. He looked at the beast, then at the hair spilling down its shoulders, and he did not reach for the chain.

He paid for his passage with a single lotus bloom laid on the harbour ledger in place of coin, and by the next high tide there was only a drift of petals along the wall. Some evenings, when the wind is right, you can still hear a chain on the cobbles and see a long pale shape at the lighthouse rail, hair streaming out over a lion who never once looked back at the town.