Black and grey elephant head tattoo framed by mandala patterns and flowers, placed on the front of a thigh.

Elephant mandala on the thigh

Geometric · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A large elephant head faces forward, surrounded by a mandala of radiating circles, petals and small flowers. The fine linework is shaded with stippled dots and grey tones, giving the design depth and texture. The tattoo fills most of the frame on the front of a thigh, with a plain background of a doorway and a no smoking sign.

Geometric Botanical Thigh Elephant Mandala Flower Leaves Ornament Pattern

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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

The guard at the Ferrowbridge crossing turns your papers over twice, as though the back might say something different from the front. Beyond the window the river runs brown and fast under the bridge, and behind you a lorry idles with its hazard lights blinking. Your grandmother's brass seal sits wrapped in a wool sock at the bottom of the case, and you have already decided not to mention it.

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The seal is an elephant head no bigger than a walnut, its ears cut into rings of petals, its trunk ending in a curl like a fern. She had it made in a bazaar in Madurai the year before the family left, and she pressed it into every letter she sent, the same ring of lotus in wax until the wax smelled faintly of cloves. You were told it was only a seal. You were told a great many things at the kitchen table.

The officer asks what is in the sock. You say it is a stamp, which is true, and she tips it toward the light. Her thumb finds the spiral of the trunk and rests there. She asks who taught you to cut the flowers so small, and you say your grandmother, which is also true, and the queue behind you goes quiet in the way queues do when they are listening.

She presses the seal into the blotter on her desk, lifts it, and turns the sheet toward you. Forty small petals ring a head that faces straight out at you, patient as a cathedral door. "Go on, then," she says, and hands the seal back with the ink still wet.