Black line drawing of the elephant-headed deity Ganesha framed by an ornate mandala and resting on a lotus, a flash design suited to a larger back or chest piece.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ganesha with mandala and lotus design

Blackwork · Black and grey · Flash

A seated, elephant-headed figure with multiple arms is centred within a dense, layered mandala of petal and dot patterns. Its base sits on a stylised lotus flower with pointed petals, all rendered in fine black linework and stippled shading on a plain white background. The composition is symmetrical and fills the frame evenly, with no colour.

Blackwork Botanical Ganesha Elephant Deity Mandala Lotus Flower Ornament

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down by the stove, you're letting the pit cold in. Now. My grandfather told this in the Gelli level when the roof still talked to us, and he swore every word, though he swore at most things.

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There was a shaft called Nine Fathom where the seam ran thin and wet, and the owners kept sending men down because the coal was good and the men were cheap. One March the cage jammed at the top of the heading, and a tallyman named Idris Bowen stood at the gate with his lamp and his slate, counting men who weren't coming back up. Every time someone tried to force a way through the fall, the stone came down again. Ropes snapped. Lamps would not catch. The overman said it was bad luck, and the chapel said it was something worse. Idris said nothing, because he had a wife at home who baked bread for the lodgers and he did not want to be the one who told her.

Then Mr Venkat came up the drift from the pump house. He was a fitter from the Rhondda side who never drank and never gossiped, and he carried a small brass figure wrapped in a handkerchief. It had an elephant's head and sat cross-legged on a flower with pointed petals, with more arms than a man has any use for. He set it on a timber prop, lit a stub of candle in front of it, and murmured something none of us could follow. Then he took up his shovel and started clearing the rubble from the side nobody had been working, one slow scoop at a time.

By dawn the fall had given way, and the men on the rope heard tapping from the far side. Idris opened his slate, looked at the column of names, and drew a single line through the lot of them. When they brought the brass god up at the end of the shift, the candle had burned down to nothing, and its face was black with lamp smoke, though the little lotus under it was clean as the day it was cast.