Blue and black mandala-patterned elephant tattoo across the upper back of a woman seen from behind.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Mandala elephant on upper back

Geometric · Back · Mixed · Photo

A large elephant in profile is filled with ornate mandala patterns, with a fainter blue mandala behind its body. The linework is bold black, with the blue wash, white highlights and fine dotted detail creating depth across the body. The tattoo fills the centre of a bare upper back against a plain light background.

Geometric Back Elephant Mandala Floral pattern Ornament

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

Mind your feet on that hatch, it's slick with the night's spray, and sit where the lamp can catch you. You want the elephant, do you? Then you want the Marigold, a barque out of Bristol with a hull the colour of wet slate, and you want Tobias Penhale, the carpenter, who could not sleep without a brush in his hand.

Keep reading

They were carrying a gift for a rajah's widow across four thousand miles of grey water, and the gift was a bull elephant called Sadhya. She was the colour of a February morning and ate ship's biscuit from any hand that dared offer one. For three weeks the crew kept their distance and their prayers. Then Penhale went to her with a pot of Prussian blue he had bought from a Dutchman for two shillings and a lie, and he began to paint.

He worked by lantern once the watch was set, while the sea went black and then silver. Circles within circles, lotus petals opening like the tide, rosettes across her shoulder and flank, and between them tiny dots struck with a nail's head, hundreds of them, until the old beast seemed to be walking out of a dream of some far-off temple. The men stopped mocking him. Even the captain came down with his spectacles to look, and said nothing at all, which for him was a sermon.

When we raised the Cape the squall came out of nowhere and the Marigold lay over until her yardarms kissed the water. Sadhya did not panic. She stood braced in her pen, bright and patterned, and when the timbers stopped groaning she trumpeted once at the sky. Penhale swore it was the blue that held her steady. I have never known if he was joking. I have sailed under that same sky many times since, and I still look for those circles in the foam.