Black and grey ornamental elephant tattoo with a lotus above its head, in mandala-style linework, on the outer thigh.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornate elephant and lotus on a thigh

Dotwork · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A front-facing elephant head is filled with intricate mandala-style patterns, with decorative panels on the forehead, trunk and ears and tusks outlined in clean black lines. Above it sits a lotus flower with layered petals, each filled with fine scrollwork and dots. The work is entirely black and grey, with stippled shading adding depth to the skin, and the design is centred on the upper leg.

Dotwork Botanical Thigh Elephant Lotus Mandala Flower Ornament Pattern

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

On the Gomti, where the river bends like a tired arm, there was a barge called Sundar, named for the elephant carved on its prow. Every panel of that elephant had been cut by Nanak the boatwright in the year his wife crossed to the far bank and did not come back. He carved one petal for each night he waited, and when the petals ran out he carved the lotus above the elephant's head, layer over layer, so the boat would always point towards the place she had gone.

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His grandson Ravi inherited the barge and the carving, and the flood took them both in the boy's twentieth year. Nobody could say how it happened. The barge was found three miles downstream, grounded in the reeds with its prow turned upriver as though it had been trying to climb. The elephant's tusks were still white and its eyes still held the black dots the carver had left unpainted. Ravi was not aboard, but the mooring rope had been tied in a knot Nanak used only for his wife's shawls.

The villagers pulled the barge onto the mud and burned the reeds around it, as the custom required. The old women on the ghats said the elephant had gone looking for the boy, and the boy had gone looking for his grandmother, and that a river which keeps its promises will sometimes keep them in strange places.

The next spring a lotus opened in the mud where the barge had lain, its petals layered and dotted with fine scrollwork, and it turned its face each dawn towards the far bank.