Black and grey elephant head tattoo with a mandala and daisies across the upper arm and shoulder.

Elephant head with mandala and daisies on upper arm

Botanical · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

An elephant head fills the upper arm, framed by daisies and a fan-shaped mandala motif across the top of the shoulder. The linework is fine and detailed, with soft grey shading on the trunk, forehead and petals. The design is entirely black and grey and the composition wraps down the arm toward the elbow.

Botanical Geometric Upper arm Shoulder Elephant Mandala Daisy Flower Eye Trunk

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

Old Hamid swore the elephant had stepped out of the temple wall the night the river came over the road, and that he had watched it wade through Kasra Lane with daisies tangled in its ears. Nobody believed him, least of all his son Rafi, who swept the spice stalls before dawn and had never seen anything bigger than a stray goat.

Keep reading

The children called the animal Mandir, after the painted fan above its brow, and it came to the well each evening when the heat broke. Hamid's wife had been the only one to bring it bread. When she died, the bread stopped, but the elephant kept coming, lowering its great grey head to the step as if waiting for someone to notice it had arrived.

The flood came in the month of the short rains. Rafi was tying sacks of cardamom to the shrine steps when the water reached his knees and then his waist. He heard a sound like a cart on wet stone, and the elephant was there, kneeling in the mud, its trunk curled around the sacks one by one and lifting them onto the roof. Between each load it pulled up wild daisies from the wasteland and laid them on the wet tiles, as though they were payment or apology.

When the water went down, the whole wall had been painted over in grey ink, the forehead fan, the patient eyes, a crown of daisies running down to the gate. Rafi still sweeps the lane before dawn. He leaves a handful of flowers at the foot of the wall, and if you ask him, it has never once been bare since.