Black and grey shaded tattoo of an elephant head with an ornate headdress and an Om symbol on the trunk, on the side of a person's ribs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ganesha elephant head on the ribs

Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A shaded elephant head, in the style of Ganesha, wears an ornate headdress with swirling floral scrollwork and an Om symbol on its trunk. The linework is fine and the grey shading gives the face and ears volume. The tattoo sits centrally on the ribs against bare skin, with a grey vest top pulled aside beside it and a small tattoo visible on one finger.

Ribs Elephant Ganesha Om symbol Headdress Swirl Floral

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ovens were already ticking when the wrong flour turned up again, and I told the delivery lad what my nan told me: a bad sack is only a problem if you pretend it isn't. We had forty loaves to shape before the first milk float rattled down Hollis Street. Stanley, who has done the sweet trays for nine years, was cracking cardamom pods with the flat of a knife, and the whole back room smelled like a market in the rain.

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The trouble that morning was a wedding order: four hundred cardamom buns and a three-tier sponge that refused to set, because the cold room had sulked all night. I kept thinking of the little brass elephant on Dad's mantelpiece, the one with its trunk curled up to hold a sweet. Mum said it was for clearing paths. Dad used to say that whenever something went wrong in the shop, something was standing in the way, and you asked the right god politely and then got back to the dough.

Stanley laughed at me for slipping a pinch of salt into my apron pocket for luck. Then he took a sugared modak from the tray, broke it in half, and handed me the bigger piece without a word. We got the sponge settled by carrying the tiers into the walk-in and sitting on upturned crates for a quarter of an hour, tea going cold in our hands, while the window turned from black to bruise.

By the time the first van pulled up, the buns were boxed in gold card and the tower stood level on its board. Stanley wrote the order on the lid in marker: Obstacles cleared. Collect 6am. I didn't correct him.