Pencil drawing of a Ganesha head within an ornate mandala with dotted chains and teardrop pendants, shown as a tattoo design on paper and not on skin.

Ganesha mandala design in pencil

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

A detailed pencil drawing of the elephant-headed deity Ganesha, with a crown, ornate jewellery and a tusk, set inside a mandala of leaves, petal shapes and hanging beaded chains. The linework is fine and layered, with soft grey shading on the face and trunk and dotted detailing across the ornaments. The drawing sits on white paper beside two pencils, with the whole design centred and fully visible.

Dotwork Ganesha Elephant Mandala Lotus Bead Chain Teardrop Jewellery Crown

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The first frost had furred the yard gates when my brother rang to say the bull had got into the beet clamp again. I was still in my coat at the kitchen table, sorting the wage envelopes Dad had written up in his square capitals before the stroke. Nobody else in the family can draw. I found the sheet folded inside the almanac, tucked between February and March, and unfolded it under the lamp, expecting a field plan.

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It was an elephant. Not the cartoon kind Mum stuck on the fridge for Tom's birthday, but a grave-faced creature with a crown built of stacked rings, one tusk, and eyes that seemed to listen rather than look. Around its head he had drawn a lotus, each petal shaded so carefully the paper seemed to lift. From the petal tips hung chains of tiny beads ending in teardrops, like the icicles off the byre roof when the wind drops. Along the bottom edge, in pencil so faint I had to tilt it to the light, he had written: For the gate that sticks.

I laughed, then stopped. The gate had stuck since August. He had meant to plane the bottom rail every winter for forty years.

So I went out at seven in my wellies with a torch in my teeth and a tin of oil. I did the gate, then the bull, who needed nothing but a bucket of nuts. The ice beads on the wire caught the torchlight like the dots on his drawing, and I thought, he always did want things counted properly. The gate swings true now. The drawing is pinned above the Rayburn, where the frost can't get at it.