Teal line drawing of the elephant-headed deity Ganesha wearing an ornate crown, with a raised hand bearing an om symbol, shown as a flash design.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ganesha head in teal line and wash

Colour · Flash

A front-facing drawing of Ganesha's elephant head with a decorated crown, beaded jewellery, a forehead mark and a raised hand carrying an om symbol. The detailed ornamental linework is shaded with soft teal wash, giving the figure gentle tonal depth. The single-hue colour scheme sits on a plain pale background, with the design centred and fully visible.

Ganesha Elephant Om symbol

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, for the lamp is low and I will not tell the part about the bridge twice. The river Sarvani ran past the walls of Keshmaar then, wide and brown, and it did not care who drowned in it. On the morning of the harvest feast, Ilvi, the ferryman's granddaughter, stood on the wet steps with a basket of sweet dumplings on her hip and watched her grandfather's boat sink slowly beside the pier, as if the river had changed its mind about carrying anyone that day.

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A stranger sat on the top step where no stranger had sat before. He had the head of an elephant, grey-blue as the water before a storm, and a crown carved all over with lotus flowers and little curling leaves. Strings of beads hung from his ears and clicked when he turned. In one hand he held a reed pen, and with the other he made a flat, open gesture, palm out, as a clerk might wave away a queue. Ilvi asked him what he wanted. He said he wanted nothing, but that every crossing had its obstacles written in a ledger somewhere, and he was the one who read the ledger aloud.

He asked her where she meant to go. Across the river, to her brother's wedding, she said, and the boat was the only way across. The elephant god tapped the pen against a stone at her feet. That stone, he said, was the first obstacle, and it was hers to lift. She bent and lifted it, and it was lighter than it looked. Beneath it lay another, and another, and each one she lifted she set down in the shallows, one after another, until the river had a row of pale stones running out across it like the steps of a stair.

By the time the mist burned off, Ilvi was standing on the far bank with dry feet and a dumpling still warm in her hand. When she turned to thank the stranger, the top step was empty, save for a small mark drawn in wet ink, a curl like a sleeping snake, pressed into the stone where his palm had rested.