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Greetings from the Academy of Saint Gabriel.
You asked about arms blazoned "Argent, a lion's head Or jessant-de-lys gules." Here's what we found.
This is a very nice design, but it needs some tweaking to make it both consistent with historical practice and compliant with SCA rules for submission.
First, we want to make sure that we are both talking about the same central charge. When a head is shown jessant-de-lys, the head has the bottom of the fleur-de-lys coming out the mouth and the top of the fleur-de-lys rising up behind and over the top of the head, and the head has no neck. We suspect you already know this but wanted to make sure.
In period, a lion's head is blazoned (described) as "a leopard's head" when it is shown affronty (facing the viewer) or jessant-de-lys. We found a few examples of "leopard's heads jessant-de-lys" but no "lion's heads jessant-de-lys." [1, 2] We recommend that you follow the period usage and call the charge "a leopard's head jessant-de-lys".
The SCA rules for submission state that charges that lie completely or mostly on the field must have good contrast with that field. In this case, both the head and the fleur-de-lys must have good contrast with the field. This means that, to register your arms, you either need to change the tincture of the field and the fleur-de-lys, or you need to change the tincture of the lion's head.
Historically, leopard's heads jessant-de-lys follow the SCA rule above. In fact, in almost all the examples we found, a leopard's head jessant-de-lys is typically all the same tincture; i.e. there is no contrast between the fleur-de-lys and the head. We recommend this practice, too. In the two examples we found where the leopard's head and the fleur-de-lys are different tintures, there is low contrast between the two --the head is Or and the fleur is argent. [3]
The following variants on your original design both follow period practice, and are SCA legal. We have checked them for conflict against other SCA arms, too, and they appear to be clear:
We hope this letter has been useful. Please write us again if any part of it has been unclear or if you have other questions. Zenobia Naphtali, Arval d'Espas Nord, Lothar von Katzenellenbogen, Talan Gwynek, Pedro de Alcazar, Blaise de Cormeilles, and William Castille aided in researching and writing this letter.
In Service,
Margaret Makafee
[1] Foster, Joseph. A Dictionary of Heraldry. Arch Cape Press, New York, 1989.
[2] Alison MacDermot. Public Heraldry-An ordinary of the Civic and Corporate Heraldry of England, Scotland, and Wales. Privately published.
[3] Bedingfeld, Henry, & Gwynn-Jones, Peter. Heraldry. Chartwell Books, Inc., Secaucus, New Jersey, USA (1993)