Full-colour tattoo of the elephant-headed deity Ganesha, seated with a halo of shell motifs, in a neo-traditional style on the outer thigh.

Ganesha seated with a halo of shells on thigh

Neo-trad · Thigh · Colour · Photo

A seated Ganesha with an elephant head, an ornate crown, and multiple arms holding ritual objects, with a raised palm at the front. A ring of stylised conch shells and a yellow and orange sunburst surround the figure, with bold dark outlines and smooth shading. Turquoise drapery, an orange dhoti, and jewellery in gold and red are rendered in saturated colour across the thigh.

Neo-trad Thigh Ganesha Deity Elephant Halo Crown Jewellery Necklace Sunburst

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, you lot, the fire won't warm your backs on its own. In the kingdom of Vashmara-under-the-Hills, which had seven markets and only one river, a potter's daughter called Ilaya walked down to the water one morning with a jar of wet clay on her hip. Her brother owed the moneylender four silver rupees, and the moneylender had started counting the days out loud in the square, in a voice that made the mules flinch.

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She had heard that the Lord with the Elephant Face was resting under the banyan tree by the ferry. People said he could clear any road, and Ilaya did not much care which road, so long as it led away from that ledger. When she reached him he was sitting on a woven mat with his legs folded, a crown piled up like a small stupa on his head. He had four arms. One held an axe, one a coil of rope, one a sweet of golden sugar, and the front hand was raised flat, palm out, as if to say stop. Around him the conch-sellers had propped their shells in a ring, and the low sun turned the water in them orange, then turquoise, then gold again.

He looked at her jar and said, "Make me something with that." She tried for a lamp and it slumped sideways like a drunk on a wall. He laughed until his great ears flapped, ate the sugar sweet in one bite, and said, "You came to ask me to lift your debt. I came to see a better pot. Let's each take what we came for." Then he stood, and the crowd of shells on the ferry steps began to sound, one after another, all the way up the hill.

By dusk the moneylender's ledger had gone soft in the river, its figures bleeding blue into the reeds. Ilaya's crooked lamp sat drying on the step of her father's house, and her brother was whistling somewhere behind it, though nobody could have told you what he had been paid.