Black ink ornamental elephant with a lotus flower on a woman's ribs, with script tattooed on her upper arm.

Ornamental elephant with lotus on ribs

Blackwork · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A large elephant outline is filled with ornate patterns, including a lotus flower on the body, a dotted detail and geometric bands on the legs and trunk. The work is done in solid black ink with fine and bold linework, and the design is centred across the side of the torso. A line of script tattoo is visible along the upper arm at the right edge of the frame.

Blackwork Botanical Ribs Elephant Lotus Mandala Ornamental pattern Script

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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 tin elephant had sat on the windowsill of the Hastings flat for eleven years, and Ruth was still trying to talk her brother out of it when the removal van backed up to the kerb. "It's a toy, Danny." "It's Dad's." He lifted it anyway and turned it so the lotus on its flank caught the grey light off the Channel. Every leg was banded with triangles, painted by hand in black and blue, the way their father had shown them on a stall in Pune the summer before the divorce.

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Danny wrapped it in a tea towel and carried it down the stairs as if it might go off. Ruth followed with the box of kettles. At the bottom, the landlady's cat watched them pass without interest, the way cats watch anything that is leaving. Outside, the sea was grinding shingle the way it did every October, as though the town owed it money.

In the van, Danny unwrapped the elephant and found a folded sheet pushed up inside its belly, sealed with a blob of candle wax. Ruth had never known it was hollow. The paper was a list in their father's cramped capitals: RYE, DUNGENESS, WHITSTABLE, each followed by a date and one line. Left one here for whoever needs it. Take one, leave one. The last entry was blank except for the date of their mother's funeral. Danny set the elephant on the dashboard with its trunk raised towards the lighthouse at the end of the harbour wall, and neither of them mentioned that the list had only one name crossed out.