Black and grey elephant head tattoo with a lotus mandala above it, on the inner forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Elephant and mandala on a forearm

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A large elephant head faces forward, with its trunk curling down the centre, and a lotus-style mandala rises above its head. Fine stippled dots and ornamental line detail build up the shading on the elephant and the patterned ornaments, with a few small red dots scattered along the outline. The design is centred on the forearm and shown in black and grey with a touch of red accent.

Dotwork Geometric Forearm Elephant Mandala Lotus Tusk Trunk Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain had been coming off the canal all morning, and by noon the stall tarpaulins along Brindley Row were sagging with it. I sold brass bells and sandalwood from a trestle under the arch, and I knew every regular by the sound of their boots on the wet cobbles. Mrs Okonedo came every Thursday for incense and never once bought the cheap kind. That Thursday she brought her grandson, a boy of nine who would not stop staring at the carved elephant I kept on the back shelf, the one with the cracked left tusk.

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He asked me if it was real. I told him it was old, which is what you say when you don't want to explain that a man in Pune had carved it from a single piece of tamarind wood and then sold it to me for a pound because his daughter needed shoes. The boy asked whether elephants remembered things. His grandmother laughed and said only the ones who had been mistreated, and then she looked at me sideways, because she had known that trader too.

When the rain eased they went off towards the bridge, the boy walking backwards so he could keep the elephant in sight. I stood under the arch with the water dripping off my hood and thought about how a lotus opens slowly from the mud, one petal at a time, and how nobody ever praises the mud for it. Then I went back to the shelf and turned the carving so its cracked tusk faced the wall, where it belonged, and I wiped the dust from its forehead with my thumb.