Traditional style tattoo of an elephant-headed deity with a red and cream ornate crown on the inner forearm, in black, red and cream ink.

Ganesh head with ornate crown on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A large elephant-headed figure, with a dotted, ornate crown above and a trunk curling downward, is shown across the forearm. The bold black outlines and solid black shading are filled with red and cream, with dotted borders and leaf-like patterning along the trunk. The design is centred on the forearm against a dark background.

Traditional Forearm Elephant Deity Crown Lotus Trunk Tusk Mandala

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The grain-weigher of Tamba Ghat kept two sets of stones. The heavy ones he used for the farmers who came down from the hills with sacks on their shoulders, and the light ones for the widows who came with coins knotted in their hems. Every market day he weighed out his lies beside the shrine of the elephant-headed god, and every market day the god sat with a red lotus held to his trunk and said nothing at all.

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One dry season the river shrank to a thread and the widows could not pay. Their children went hungry while the weigher's granary grew fat. An old woman named Pari, who sold lamp oil by the steps, came to the shrine at dusk and set down a single lotus bud. "You see everything," she told the stone face. "Then you know what he is."

That night the weigher dreamed a great grey shape stood over his bed, its tusk broken and its crown dusted white. It lifted a trunk as long as a rope and laid one finger, soft as cloth, against his chest. "Count," it said. In the morning every sack in his storehouse was empty of rice and full of river sand, and his own stones had grown so heavy he could not lift them from the floor.

He walked the steps barefoot, begging Pari for mercy. She only pointed at the shrine, where the elephant-headed god sat as before, one tusk gleaming, and the lotus in his trunk seemed a little brighter than it had been. The widows, she said, were paid in full that day, and the grain was honest from then on, though the weigher never again lifted a stone.