Black ornamental elephant head tattoo with paisley and mandala patterns on the upper back of a woman with wavy blonde hair.

Ornate elephant head on upper back

Back · Black and grey · Photo

A woman's upper back, seen from behind, with a black tattoo of an elephant head centred between the shoulder blades. The elephant's ears, forehead and trunk are filled with dense paisley and mandala-style ornament drawn in fine black lines and dots. The plain background and white lace top keep the focus on the tattoo.

Back Elephant Mandala Paisley Ornament

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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

Mind your feet on the guy ropes, Tilly, and don't you dare touch the ears. Those ears have been wearing their pattern longer than your mother has been alive. Sit down on that upturned crate and I'll tell you how Bramble got her coat of paisley.

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Summer of 1931, the fair pitched on a common outside Leeds, and the one who kept the elephant was a widow called Nell Pardoe. Nell could not abide an empty surface. She would sit under the big top with a pot of boiled walnut ink and a fine sable brush and draw on anything that held still: the side of the wagons, the tent poles, the backs of the handbills. Bramble stood for hours because Nell gave her sugar beet and hummed hymns. One wet evening Nell drew a teardrop on the left ear, curling into itself like a cat asleep, and the old beast shivered and blew out a sigh that rattled the paraffin lamps.

After that Nell kept going. Every night another line, another dot, a round mandala on the forehead, little ladders of hatching down the trunk. By the end of the season the elephant looked like a page of lace someone had forgotten to finish. The fair folk said the ink would bring rain, and rain did come, but so did the crowds, and the crowds paid for the ink.

Nell died the winter after, in a cold caravan at Scarborough. The elephant was sold on to a circus in Ireland and then, the story goes, to nobody at all, because one morning the field gate stood open and the frost was printed with tracks that led only to the sea. Some say the ink is still there, faded to the colour of wet slate, and that if you stand on the shingle at dusk you can make out the pattern shining through the waves. Now go and find your mother, and mind the ropes.