Black line drawing of a front-facing elephant head filled with dense mandala-style patterns, suitable as a flash design for a tattoo.

Ornate elephant head line drawing

Geometric · Black and grey · Flash

A front-facing elephant head drawn in black outline with no shading or fill. The forehead, trunk and ears are packed with dotwork, scalloped borders, stripes and repeating geometric motifs. The composition is symmetrical and the image is plain black on white.

Geometric Dotwork Elephant Mandala Ornament Tusk Pattern

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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 panel had been over the bandstand since 1926, and nobody had looked at it closely in thirty years. Dora found it with a torch and a stepladder, a grey elephant head under a film of cigarette smoke, its ears spread like two lace fans. Every inch was filled: dots across the forehead, stripes running down the trunk, little scalloped borders round the eyes that looked as if someone had counted each one by hand.

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Her grandfather had painted it, or so the regulars at the Saltcote Pavilion liked to say, usually after the second whisky. Men who had served out east swore the pattern had come home in a notebook, though Dora had never seen the notebook. She had only the ceiling and the dance floor beneath it, where the foxtrot wore a path through the varnish every Saturday night.

She worked through the winter with a fine brush and the black ink the committee had approved, tracing each dot back into its line. The pattern had a rhythm if you let your eye go soft: triangles, half-moons, a band of stripes that repeated until it reached the tusks and broke into a single blank curve. She left that curve empty. It was the only gap in the whole head, and it sat in the drawing like a held breath.

On the last evening before the hall reopened, the caretaker climbed up to look. He said nothing for a long while, then pointed at the blank curve. 'Thought you'd missed a bit,' he said. 'No,' said Dora, 'that's where the band comes in.' He laughed and went down to light the lamps, and she stayed on the ladder, listening to the first chords rise through the boards.