Black and grey full arm sleeve tattoo of the elephant-headed deity Ganesha wearing an ornate crown, surrounded by paisley and mandala patterns, on the upper arm and forearm.

Ganesha and ornamental full arm sleeve

Dotwork · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A full sleeve tattoo covers the upper arm and forearm, with an elephant head wearing an ornate crown at the centre and a tusk-like trunk curling down the arm. Above the figure, swirling paisley and mandala-style ornaments fill the upper arm and continue onto the shoulder. The work uses fine linework and stippled shading in black and grey, photographed from a slight angle against a dark indoor background.

Dotwork Realism Upper arm Forearm Ganesha Elephant Crown Mandala Paisley Ornament Sleeve Deity

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The crate has sat in the hold so long that the lid comes away damp, and the smell of camphor and wet straw reaches you before anything else does. Inside, wrapped in cloth the colour of weak tea, is the head. You were told to expect something small. The brass is dark with a month of humidity, the crown stacked with lotus petals and beaded medallions, and the trunk coils down past the chin like a rope somebody took care to braid.

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Fenwick wants it logged for the Penang manifest by noon, and the first mate wants it lashed where the spray cannot reach, so you do both, one hand on the ledger and one on the cold metal. Since Aden the sea has been hard. Three men have been sick and somebody has been leaving rice on the rail at dusk. You suspect the ship's boy. You suspect the old Goan cook. You suspect yourself, because you have started speaking to the figure when the watch is quiet, asking for a steady wind the way your mother used to ask her saints.

The storm comes off the Malacca side with no warning but a shift in the swell. The crate breaks its lashings and you go down with a lantern in your teeth to find the head rolled against a water cask, eyes still level, the engraved pattern on its brow catching the light like a tide line. You get your arms round it. It is heavier than any sack of rice, and you laugh aloud, because a remover of obstacles has evidently never been carried up a ladder in a gale.

At dawn the sea flattens and the head goes back into its straw. Fenwick signs the manifest without reading it. Later you climb to the bow, and Penang is a grey smudge under cloud, and the first thing you see is a fishing boat with a painted spiral on its prow, the same curl you have been turning over in your hands for three weeks. You lift two fingers to it, and then, because nobody is watching, to the crate.