Black line drawing of the elephant-headed deity Ganesha wearing an ornate crown, with an om symbol on the forehead and a lotus flower beneath the trunk.

Ganesha with crown and lotus line drawing

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A black ink line drawing of an elephant head with a decorative ornate crown, an om symbol on the forehead and a curled trunk. A lotus flower with layered petals sits beneath the head. The linework is uniform and outlined, with no shading or colour, and the design is centred on a plain white background.

Botanical Ganesha Elephant Lotus Crown Om symbol Trunk

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bell over the door of Pollard's stationers had rung three times before you looked up, and by then the boy was already halfway through the question he had carried all the way from the bus stop. He wanted to write to his father in Canada and did not know how to begin. You had sold him the blue airmail paper yourself the week before, and it sat unused on the counter between a tin of drawing pins and a jar of pear drops. Outside, the rain had turned the high street into a mirror for the lamps of the Co-op.

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You pulled a chair round to the counter, the way your mother used to for children frightened of the nib. Start with what he would most want to hear, you told him, not with what you are angry about. He tried. He crossed out three lines and blotted the fourth with his sleeve. The pen scratched like a mouse behind the skirting, and the clock over the bread shop struck five while you waited for him to find his way through.

He wrote at last: the shed door is off its hinges and I have been mending it with the wire you left. He looked up to check it was right, and you nodded. Then he asked what the elephant on the calendar behind you was for. Ganesha, you said, the one who clears the road so that other people can walk along it without falling into the ditch.

He paid his twopence, folded the letter flat against his coat and went out into the wet street. You stayed with the pen, still warm from his hand, and found you had no letter of your own to write. Through the window you watched him reach the postbox on the corner and push the envelope through its small iron mouth, and for once the road in front of him looked clear.