Black and grey tattoo of the Hindu deity Ganesha merged with the Om symbol, with ornamental patterned shading, on the upper back or nape of the neck.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ganesha and Om symbol on the upper back

Blackwork · Back · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows Ganesha's elephant head with closed eyes, a central bindi and a trunk curling into the form of the Om symbol. The linework is bold and dark, and the interior spaces are filled with decorative swirls, dots and fine patterned shading. The image is shot close up in warm, soft light, with the tattoo centred and fine body hair visible at the top edge.

Blackwork Dotwork Back Ganesha Om symbol Elephant Ornament Swirl

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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

Mind the chair by the window, it wobbles, same as the lodger who sat in it. Right, where was I. Ah yes, the summer the tide came in with the elephant.

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Mrs Pell kept a boarding house on Marrow Parade, and her one rule was that nobody took the top room, because the wind came through its window and hummed a long low note all night. Then one August a thin man arrived with a leather trunk and a roll of drawings, and he asked for that very room. He said the hum was the only thing he had missed in twenty years away. He paid in advance, in silver, and Mrs Pell didn't ask him a single question.

Each dawn he walked down to the wet sand and drew with a stick. A great round head with its eyes shut, ears like sails, and a trunk that curled round on itself into a shape that wasn't quite a letter. Tom Pell, her grandson, who wanted nothing more than to sign on a trawler, asked what it was. The man said it was the sound the world makes before anyone speaks, and that the elephant-headed one clears the road for people about to set out. Tom asked if he could clear the road to the Lively Anne, which was sailing on the Thursday tide.

The sea took the drawing every evening, and every morning the man drew it again. Then one morning there was a red dot between the closed eyes that hadn't been there the day before, and the man was gone. His trunk was still under the top-room bed, and Tom was not on the Lively Anne. He was sitting on the sea wall with a stick in his lap, drawing. Every morning since, the tide has come right up to that drawing, stopped as if it had been asked nicely, and gone back out without touching a line of it.