Black and grey shaded Ganesha tattoo wearing an ornate crown, placed across the lower back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ganesha portrait on the lower back

Realism · Back · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows the elephant-headed deity Ganesha facing forward, with a decorated crown, beaded jewellery, a tilak mark on the forehead and a curled trunk. The head is rendered with smooth grey shading and fine dark outlines, with soft highlights on the ornaments. The design is centred on the skin, and the crown and face fill most of the frame.

Realism Back Ganesha Elephant Deity Crown Jewellery Trunk

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The brass elephant had been wedged behind the clockwork of the lamp since before my father took the post, and nobody on Carrack Head would admit to putting it there. Its trunk curled up like a question mark. Its crown had worn to a dull gold where a hundred keepers' thumbs had rubbed it for luck. Mam said it was a remover of obstacles, which seemed a fair job for something that had no business being on a rock in the Celtic Sea.

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The autumn the fog came in for nine days, the oil ran low and the generator coughed like an old dog. I climbed the iron stairs with a torch in my teeth and a tin of paraffin under one arm, and I talked to the elephant the whole way up, the way you'd talk to a horse you didn't trust. 'Mind the glass,' I told it. 'You'll have us both in the drink.' Nobody answered, which is the best thing a god can do in a storm.

On the ninth night the lamp caught on the third try. The beam swept out across the water and I watched it find the Lily Anne, a crabber out of Porthcurno with her engine dead and two boys bailing on deck. I did not pray. I wiped my hands on my jumper and watched the light go round, once, twice, steady as a heartbeat, until the boat turned for home.

Next morning I polished the elephant's crown until it shone, and I left it facing the sea where the boats come in. Mam says that's not how you look after a god. I say it worked, and she can argue with the tide.