Black line flash design of an ornate elephant filled with mandala and paisley patterns, with three flowers and a small lotus motif on a white background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornate elephant and flowers flash sheet

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

The sheet shows a decorative elephant in profile, its body and trunk filled with dotted, mandala-like patterns, circles and paisley motifs. Three separate flower designs sit beside it, one a rounded mandala-style bloom, one a large open flower with leaves, and one a small flower on a leafy stem, with a lotus-like motif below. All elements are rendered in solid black linework and dotwork on a plain white background, with no shading or colour.

Botanical Elephant Flower Mandala Paisley Lotus Leaf Dot

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 rains came late to the valley of Ambar that year, and the tank behind the palace went green at its edges. Old Mirel, who kept the elephants, said the animal called Sunder had been restless for a week, pacing the stockade and pressing its brow against the teak posts as if it could hear water under the ground. The queen's steward wanted the beast painted for the spring festival, so the painters came up from the river towns with their pots of rust-brown paste and their fine bamboo pins.

Keep reading

They worked on Sunder through three long afternoons. First came the circles across the great flank, then the paisley teardrops curling toward the tail, then the dots, thousands of them, set so close that the shadow of each pin lay beside the last. Mirel sat with the animal and fed it jaggery. When the lead painter tired, a girl named Chandi, who had come only to carry water, took the pin from her hand and drew a single lotus on the trunk's curl. Nobody had asked her to. The painter laughed and let her finish it.

On the morning of the festival the paste had dried to a deep black, and the marks would last, the old women said, until the monsoon after next. Sunder walked out through the gate with the whole town watching, its ears flapping slowly, each dot catching the light. At the tank it stopped, lowered its head, and drew a long breath through its trunk. Chandi, standing at the water's edge with her empty jug, saw the lotus on the curl lift as the animal lifted its head, and she thought it looked very much as if the flower had opened.