Black and grey flash design of an elephant-headed Ganesha within an ornate mandala, with a vertical line of Hindi script below.

Ganesha head in mandala with Hindi text

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

The design shows a front-facing Ganesha head with a jewelled crown, a forehead mark and a curled trunk, set inside a layered mandala of petal-like points. The linework is fine and outlined, with stippled dot shading on the face and ornaments. A vertical line of Hindi script runs beneath the mandala on a white background.

Dotwork Ganesha Elephant Mandala Crown Trunk

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain had closed the road to Mawal for three days, and the bride's cart stood at the ford with one wheel sunk to the hub. Dev had walked the last mile in his wedding shoes, which were ruined, and he had a stick in his hand that he had cut from the hedge without quite deciding to. Across the water, Hari the carter sat on the shaft of his own bullock cart and laughed at him.

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Old Kamla, who kept the little shrine on the bank, watched from under her shawl. The elephant-headed god there had a crown of painted brass and a trunk curled like a question. 'He clears the roads,' she said, 'but he does not clear them for a man who is already swinging.' Dev said nothing. He went down to the edge of the water to shout, and saw in the still pool a young man with his arm raised and his mouth open, and it was not a face he would have wanted at his wedding.

He let the stick fall into the reeds. Then he waded in, took the rim of the wheel beside Hari, who had stopped laughing, and they counted together, three times, until the wheel came up out of the mud with a sound like a cork. Hari slapped the bullock and said nothing about the stick. At dusk they reached Mawal with the lamps already lit, and the bride's father came out to meet them, wet to the knees himself.

Kamla had the last word, as she always did. The brass trunk still had mud on its curl from where Dev had leaned against it to catch his breath, and she said she would leave it there, since the god had been paid for the crossing.