Black and grey elephant with ornamental patterns and a pink lotus flower raised on its trunk, tattooed on the lower leg.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Elephant holding a lotus on a calf

Calf · Mixed · Photo

A black and grey elephant stands with its trunk raised to hold a pink lotus flower at the top of the design. The elephant is outlined in bold lines with shaded grey areas and decorative swirls and dots across its body and legs. The pink lotus provides the only strong colour against the greyscale figure, set on smooth skin against a tiled background.

Calf Elephant Lotus Flower Pattern Swirl Trunk

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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, the 4.10 is late again and we have till the signal changes. You want the elephant? Then hush, because she was never a loud beast. Her name was Parvati Mae, and she came over from Madras in the belly of a steamer with forty crates of tea and a man called Hobday who kept her papers in a biscuit tin.

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The lotus came later. At Ferrers Road station, where the platform roof leaks into the tea urn, a porter named Ambrose Quill found a pink bloom floating in the water tank one May morning. Nobody had planted it, and nobody could say how it got there. Parvati took one look, lifted her trunk the way a bishop lifts a candle, and would not let anyone take it from her until she had carried it the whole length of the down platform and set it on the bench by the lamp room.

Hobday sold her the next spring to a travelling fair that went under in the floods. Ambrose kept the bloom pressed in his ledger, and every time a train came in late he would open the page and count the petals, which were always eight, never seven or nine. The signalman swore she still walked the sidings after dark, grey as the ballast, a flower held high above the rails.

So when you hear the whistle, don't look for the engine. Look up. If the light is low and the fog comes off the cutting, you'll see a raised trunk and something pink going past the gantry, and you'll know the old girl is still carrying what she was given. Mind the step, now. The train's in.