Black and grey mandala-style elephant tattoo on the thigh, with dense blackwork and dotwork patterns across its head, ears and trunk.

Mandala elephant on a thigh

Blackwork · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A front-facing elephant filled with ornamental mandala patterns, including circular medallions on the ears and forehead and geometric panels on the trunk and legs. The bold black outlines are combined with fine dotwork shading on the ears and solid black fills in the decorative panels. The design is entirely black and grey on pale skin, centred on the upper leg with plain background.

Blackwork Dotwork Thigh Elephant Mandala Ornament Pattern Medallion

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The painters came to the temple yard the week before the rains, when the elephant Sudha was led out from the stables with her ears already grey at the edges. Old Mohan's wife, Kamla, had been commissioned to decorate her for the procession, and she did not hurry. She sat on an upturned crate with a tin of lamp-black, a bowl of rice paste and a brush made from a single goat hair, and she began at the forehead, where the great medallion would sit like a second sun.

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By the third day the ears were finished, rings inside rings with dots spaced the way Kamla's mother had taught her, and the trunk held its bands of triangles. The legs took longer. Halfway down the left foreleg the paste ran out, so Kamla scraped the soot from the cooking pot and mixed it with oil, and the black she made that evening was darker than anything before it. Sudha stood through it all, swaying a little, as if she were listening to the patterns settle.

On the morning of the procession a boy from the bazaar asked why the elephant had so many circles on her when no one would ever see the inside of them. Kamla wiped her hands on her sari and said the circles were not for the crowd. They were for the one who walked under them at night, when the lanterns were out and the road home was only a line of dust. Every ring was a way back.

The procession wound out past the tanks at dusk, and by the time the lanterns were lit Sudha had slipped her rope at the bend where the banyan grew. Her prints went up the hill through the soft mud towards the cottage where Kamla lived alone. In the morning the door stood open, the paste tin was full, and on the plaster beside the hearth someone had painted a small elephant, front-facing, its ears ringed with the same dots, as if it had only paused on its way out.