Black and grey line drawing of the Hindu deity Ganesha with an ornate crown, earrings and a curled trunk, shown as a tattoo design.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ganesha head design in black and grey

Black and grey · Flash

A front-facing drawing of the elephant-headed deity Ganesha, with a tall ornamented crown, a forehead marking, and decorative earrings. The linework is fine and detailed, with shading used on the trunk, face and crown to give depth. The design is drawn in grey tones on a plain white background, with no body part visible.

Ganesha Elephant Deity Crown Trunk Earring Ornament

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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 third bend, the one where the wind comes round like a dog after a cart. Sit closer to the fire and keep your mules facing the rock. I'll tell you about Bhola, who carried salt over the Kalapani road for eleven winters and never once lost a load, which made him proud, and the road does not care for proud men. That autumn the cloud came down before noon, and the path under the cliff gave way with a sound like a sack of rice dropped from a roof.

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He was stuck on the wrong side of the rockfall with nine mules and a ledger of debts, every bag weighed and every grain owed to some merchant in Almora. He sat on a stone shaped like a squat old man and did his sums with a stub of pencil, and the sums would not come out. Beside him, in a niche of the cliff, sat a little shrine with a stone elephant, its trunk worn smooth by hands that had touched it for luck. Bhola had nothing to offer but the sweet his daughter had pressed into his coat, a lump of jaggery and flour gone soft in the damp.

He broke it in two and left half on the stone. He told the elephant he was a poor man who counted badly, and if it was the one who cleared roads, it could clear his. Then he slept, which was the foolish part, and woke to the sound of stones being rolled aside by something patient. When the cloud lifted there was a clear path down the cliff and no sign of the god, only the ledger lying open on the shrine step, every column added up in a neat hand, the pencil set down where a trunk might curl around it.

The merchant in Almora paid him in full that spring and asked no questions. Bhola never again wrote a sum without leaving a small space at the bottom of the page, and the mules, who are cleverer than anyone gives them credit for, have never once stepped on that shrine's threshold.