Black and grey ornamental elephant head tattoo with lotus flowers and a dotted arc, placed on the upper thigh.

Ornamental elephant head with lotus on thigh

Dotwork · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A detailed elephant head sits at the centre of the design, with its ears, forehead and trunk filled with mandala-like patterns, swirls and dots. Above it, a dotted arc frames a lotus flower, and small drops and a second lotus hang below the trunk. The work is shaded in black and grey, with fine dotted detail and soft tonal shading, and the design fills most of the frame on the thigh.

Dotwork Botanical Thigh Elephant Lotus Mandala Drop Ornament Swirl

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The elephant came up Coal Lane on a wet Tuesday in October, the same week the cage at Number Three went quiet for a fortnight. Nobody in Hollin Bank had seen an animal that size outside the Co-op's lorry, and half the street was at its gates before the painted wagon had turned the bend. My father stood at the end of our yard with his cap in his hands, not saying anything, which meant he was impressed.

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Her keeper was a narrow man called Mr Asif who slept in the wagon and rose before the colliery hooter. Every morning he painted Padma on the rec, the pit ponies pulling their heads round to watch. He mixed ochre with lentil water and made the swirls on her forehead with the blunt end of a bamboo stick, then dotted her ears until they looked like the lace on my nan's good tablecloth. When I was brave enough to ask, he let me hold the brush for the little heart shapes down her trunk. My fingers shook. He laughed and said the elephant would forgive me, because elephants remember everything except bad manners.

The fair moved on in November, the way fairs do, and the pit did not reopen. My father walked to the pithead every morning anyway, out of habit, and came home with his lamp unlit. The last thing Padma left behind was a lotus stencilled on the brick wall by the old winding house, faint as breath. The rain has been at it for years, but if you stand where the light falls at four o'clock you can still count the dots around its petals, and I always do.