Black and grey mandala-style elephant tattoo on the outer thigh, with ornate patterned ears, tusks and trunk filled with dotwork and fine linework.

Mandala elephant tattoo on the thigh

Dotwork · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A front-facing elephant is filled with mandala-style patterns, including circular motifs on the ears, forehead and body. The design uses bold outlines, fine linework and dotwork shading to create texture and contrast. It is rendered entirely in black and grey ink and sits across the skin of the upper leg, with the figure centred in the frame.

Dotwork Geometric Thigh Elephant Mandala Ornament Pattern

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

The elephant came down from the hills the spring the river stopped, and Mabel Trewin swore she saw the circles on its ears before she saw the animal itself. Her father said it was a trick of the mine dust. The dust lay thick on every sill in Gwyncar that year, grey as wet ash, and the men coming up from the shaft at Nine Level had coughed it into their handkerchiefs for so long that nobody noticed anything strange until the beast was standing at the top of the tip heap with its trunk curled like a question mark.

Keep reading

It did not charge or trample. It walked the lanes slowly and stopped at each doorway, and where it stopped, the old women said, the pattern on its skin looked sharper, as if someone had gone over it again with a fine pen. Dotted rings on the shoulders. Lotus shapes on the brow. Little triangles marching down the legs like the stitches on a christening gown. Mabel counted them one evening from the wall while her brother pretended not to be afraid of it.

On the third night the pit cage stuck halfway and the lamps went out in a row. The elephant stood at the mouth of the shaft and waited, its grey-black body very still, and when the men finally came up the ladders one by one it was still there, patient as a clock. Her father came last. He touched the beast's tusk as he passed, the way he touched the chapel door, and said nothing about dust.

The pit was closed by midsummer. Mabel kept the patterns in her schoolbook for years afterwards, copying the rings and dots onto the margins until the lines went soft in the damp of her coat pocket, and she never once drew the same elephant twice.