Black and grey dotwork tattoo of an elephant-headed figure with an ornate crown on a finger of a hand.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Elephant-headed figure on a finger

Dotwork · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A small black tattoo of an elephant-headed figure with a tall, ornate crown decorated with dots and circles, shown on the side of a finger. The linework is outlined with some dotted shading in the headdress, while the face and trunk are left largely open. The image is black and white, and the hand fills the left of the frame against a dark background.

Dotwork Hand Elephant Deity Headdress Dot Crown Figure

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

Sit closer, all of you, and keep the goat out of the bread, because she has heard this one more times than I have and still wants to argue with the ending. Dhanvi was a stonecutter's son in the river town of Kalpi. He was no good with words, but his hands could find the grain in any stone, and when the elders of the gate temple wanted a crown for the elephant-headed one who watches the threshold, they gave the work to him.

Keep reading

He set to it with a bronze point and a stack of cloth to wipe the dust away. Every dot had to be pressed by hand, one at a time, and the circles had to ring round them like ripples on still water. A year passed. Each evening he counted what he had done, and each morning the crown looked more crowded, more finished, more like a thing that would never need him again.

On the last night a clerk came in from the rain and asked him how many dots remained. Dhanvi said there were none left to make. The clerk smiled and asked how many he had made. Four thousand and eleven, said Dhanvi. Leave one out, said the clerk. A crown that is finished has nothing left to hope for. Then he was gone, and the lamp was gutted, and Dhanvi sat in the dark with his point in his hand.

In the morning he left one circle empty, a small hollow in the headdress, and then, because he could not bear to waste the point, he pressed a single dot onto the back of his own finger, just where he would see it each time he reached for the chisel. The old men still say that if you go to Kalpi when the river is high, you can find the god's crown with its one missing dot, and on Dhanvi's grandson's hand the dot that was never filled, and nobody has ever dared to finish it.