Black and grey dotwork tattoo of an elephant head with a mandala headdress on the calf.

Elephant head with mandala on a calf

Dotwork · Calf · Black and grey · Photo

A front-facing elephant head with its trunk curled at the bottom, its ears spread out at the sides, and a large mandala ornament above its head. The mandala and the elephant's ears are built from fine dots and radiating lines, with shading that gives the skin texture and depth. Only black and grey ink is used, and the design fills the centre of the leg with plenty of clean space around it.

Dotwork Geometric Calf Elephant Mandala Trunk Tusk Ornament Eye Ear

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The snow came over the top field on the second night of December and did not stop for eleven days. Old Hannah Cole kept the lamp lit in the byre, because the ewes were heavy and the fodder was low, and because her father had told her that a lit byre would be found by anything lost in the white. On the eighth night something came down the lane with the sound of bells.

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It was grey and enormous, and it walked with its ears spread wide like the sails of a boat coming into harbour. On its brow sat a great ring of frost in the shape of a flower, petal upon petal, every one sharp enough to catch the lamplight. Hannah did not run. She set down the bucket and asked it plainly what it wanted. The creature lowered its trunk, curled the tip of it, and laid it gently on the gate where the lamp hung, as though it were counting the lights of the farm.

Her grandmother used to say such a beast came once in every hard winter to keep watch with whoever was awake, and that it asked for nothing but a warm place to stand. So Hannah opened the byre wide. The elephant knelt in the straw among the ewes, its two white tusks gleaming, and breathed slow warm breath over the lambs until the frost on its forehead began to run down its face in thin silver lines.

By morning the snow had stopped. The lane was clear to the village, and the elephant was gone, leaving only a ring of flattened straw and a single dark seed on the threshold. Hannah planted it in spring. It came up as a stalk with a flower at the top, and every winter after, the first snow found the farm lit and ready.