Black and grey dotwork tattoo of an elephant head within a geometric mandala frame on the ankle.

Elephant head in geometric frame on an ankle

Geometric · Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

A small elephant head sits at the centre of a geometric mandala-style frame, with a lotus-like petal pattern above and fine dangling lines below. The elephant is rendered in stippled dotwork shading, while the outer frame uses thin, clean linework. The photograph is greyscale, showing a leg resting on a sandal against a dark background.

Geometric Dotwork Ankle Elephant Mandala Lotus Geometric frame

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

Mohan had been stippling the same small elephant onto brass trays for eleven years, and his eyes had started to ache at the edges. The master in the lane behind the spice market paid by the dot, which he said was the only honest measure of a man's patience. On the morning the monsoon finally broke, a woman came in with a rolled cloth under her arm and asked him to copy the elephant from her grandmother's dowry box, which had been worn smooth by hands.

Keep reading

The box was lidded with a lotus pressed into the wood, its petals held inside a diamond frame of thin lines. Mohan tilted the lid to the window and saw that the elephant had its trunk raised, not in greeting but as if testing the air for rain. He sketched it three times on butter paper. Each time the trunk curled differently, and each time his hand, steadied by years of pricking metal, drew a line that was too straight. The woman laughed and said her grandmother had never drawn a straight line in her life.

So he stopped trying to be exact. He let the dots gather thick at the forehead where the shadow sat, thinned them along the ears until the light came through, and hung fine threads below the frame like rain caught on a wire. When he finished, the elephant looked less like a carving and more like something that had just climbed out of the lotus pond to shake itself dry.

The woman paid him in cardamom and a single coin with a hole punched through it. Months later a parcel arrived from across the sea containing a photograph of the design, inked onto a patch of skin, and a note that read only: it has walked further than either of us expected. Mohan pinned the photograph above his bench, beside the one tray he had never sold, and went back to his dots.