Large black linework back tattoo of an elephant in an ornate headdress, with feathers, lotus flowers and a filigree panel, in a botanical style across the back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Elephant and lotus back piece

Botanical · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A large back tattoo shows an elephant wearing an ornate headdress, with feathers rising above it and lotus flowers arranged around its body. A filigree panel sits at the base of the design. The work is mainly fine black linework with light grey shading, with a faint purple tint visible in parts of the flowers, and it fills most of the upper and mid back.

Botanical Back Elephant Lotus Feather Flower Headdress Filigree Ornament

Find an artist for this

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

Ada Pryce had not expected the elephant to be the thing that stopped the fair at Harrow Row, but by Wednesday the whole street was out on the cinder path to watch it drink from the standpipe. The keeper, a man called Lazarus Bright with a voice like a rusted hinge, had brought it from a show that folded in Hartlepool. It wore a headdress of tooled brass and a plume of dyed ostrich feathers that the wind kept lifting, and every time it swung its trunk the children ran shrieking into the terraces.

Keep reading

Ada had a sewing box and a debt. Her husband, Joe, was still down the pit on the night shift, and the rent man was due on Friday. Bright offered two shillings to anyone who could patch the torn ear-flap of the headdress before the fair moved on. She took the job because the brass was cold and the feathers were work she understood, careful and fine. She stitched lotus petals from a bolt of pale green silk someone had donated from a chapel raffle, and she worked a filigree panel around the hem in black thread on grey cloth, tight as the grain in a pit prop.

On the last evening the elephant lowered its head to the pond beside the colliery wheel. The water was black with coal dust, and the silk petals she had sewn lay on it without sinking. Joe came off shift and stood at the fence with his lamp still lit, and for once nobody asked him for anything. The elephant lifted its trunk and shook the feathers loose, and the silk lotus stayed afloat on the slag water as if it had been waiting all along for somewhere to grow.