Black line drawing of an elephant filled with mandala, paisley and dot patterns, shown as a flash design rather than on skin.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Mandala-patterned elephant design

Geometric · Black and grey · Flash

A side-profile elephant with its trunk curled forward, drawn in bold black outline. The body and head are filled with mandala rosettes, paisley shapes, flower motifs, wave bands and stippled dot lines. The image is a plain black design on a white background with no shading or colour.

Geometric Dotwork Elephant Mandala Paisley Flower Dot Trunk

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 paint was still tacky on the left ear when Anand's daughter came running up the ramp with word that the rains would arrive a day early and the procession had to leave at dawn. Her father swore in two languages and sent her for more ochre. Keshav, the old handler's grandson, stood at the elephant's shoulder and watched the brushwork crawl across the grey hide like frost on a window.

Keep reading

Mira had spent three nights on the rosettes, each one a ring of petals that had to close exactly where it began. She dotted every line with a quill, one stipple at a time, because the old men said a line without dots let the spirits walk off an animal's back. Her wrists ached and her fingers were stained to the second knuckle, but the mandalas sat square on the shoulders and the paisley curled up over the forehead like smoke.

Bhanu did not care for the fuss. He lifted his trunk and curled the tip at the crowd as if asking for a coin. Mira laughed and painted a spiral on the end of it, and he sneezed a fine orange mist across her sleeve, so that she had to paint the cuff too, badly, while he watched her with the patience of something that had been decorated many times before.

By dusk the rain had not come, and the procession went out through the gate in the cool blue hour with the drums going soft behind it. Mira climbed the wall to watch. She counted the rosettes as they passed under the lamps, one, two, three, the dots holding their places in the wet air, until the last ring of petals rounded the corner and was gone.