Black and grey realism tattoo of the elephant-headed deity Ganesha wearing an ornate jewelled crown, with red accents on the trunk and forehead, on an upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ganesha portrait on upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A realistic portrait of the elephant-headed deity Ganesha, wearing an ornate crown set with jewels and strands of beads, with eyes and facial features shaded in fine detail. The trunk and forehead mark are picked out in red, while the rest of the design uses soft grey shading to create depth and form. The portrait fills the frame, with the arm's curve visible around the edges and a dark background behind the skin.

Realism Upper arm Ganesha Elephant Deity Crown Jewel Bead Trunk

Find an artist for this

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

The snow has sealed the pass for three days, and the landlady has run out of patience before she runs out of flour. You stand at the hearth of the Crooked Hart with a bowl of sweet dough that won't hold its pleat, because the recipe is in your mother's hand and her hand is in Leeds. Above the bar, the brass god in his niche watches you fail, his small trunk tipped toward the ceiling as if he has an opinion about it.

Keep reading

Four guests are stranded with you. There is a cartographer who keeps measuring the drifts with a brass chain, a widow with a crate that rattles when no one is looking, a boy who hasn't spoken since the coach went into the ditch, and Mr Pell, the carrier, who wants his horse fed before anyone else is fed. None of them can clear the road. You can only clear the table, so you start with the thing in front of you, folding the dough around jaggery and grated coconut and pinching each edge until it closes into a small crown.

The cartographer asks what the god is for. You tell him the god is the one you ask before starting anything, and that you have never once been told no. The boy takes the first sweet without a word and eats it in three bites, and something in his shoulders loosens. The widow opens her crate at last: inside, wrapped in newspaper, is a second figure, its trunk chipped at the tip, and she sets it down beside the first as though introducing them.

By morning the thaw has not come, but someone has shovelled a path through the drift at the door, and the boy's footprints run ahead of everyone else's. You leave the last sweet on the shrine's plate, the way your mother did, and in the grey light the crooked brass trunk seems to point straight at the door.