Black ink dotwork drawing of an ornate elephant head with lotus flowers and a mandala motif, shown as a tattoo design on paper.

Ornate elephant mandala design

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

A detailed elephant head is drawn in black ink on white paper, with its ears, trunk and forehead filled with patterned swirls, scales and dotted shading. A lotus and a half-mandala sit above the head, with smaller lotus flowers, teardrop shapes and four-point stars arranged down both sides and below. The linework is crisp and symmetrical, with the dense stippling creating depth against the open white areas of the page.

Dotwork Botanical Elephant Lotus Mandala Teardrop Star Ornament

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

Brother Anselm was the only one at the monastery who was not afraid of the elephant, mostly because he was too old to be afraid of anything that took its time. It came up the goat track in the third month of the rains, grey as wet slate, with ink-black patterns worked into its ears like the lace on a widow's shawl. It stopped at the lower gate and would not go on until someone brought it a bowl of rice, and when the bowl was empty it stood there anyway, looking at the wall as if the wall owed it an explanation.

Keep reading

The novices wanted to drive it off with sticks. Anselm told them it had walked a long way to look at the lotus pond, and that a creature who came so far to see water deserved to see it properly. Each morning the elephant stood at the pond's edge with its trunk curled, drinking, and the rain ran from the dome of its head in drops that fell in rings on the surface. The boys counted the rings. Anselm counted the small stars the rain made when the wind dropped and the water lay flat as a slate.

In the dry season the elephant did not come back. The pond shrank to a green coin in the yard, and the novices, scraping out the mud to deepen it, found a pattern pressed into the clay where the great feet had stood: a half-circle of lotus petals, a ring of dots, four-pointed marks like the stars above a door. Nobody had drawn them. The abbot looked at them for a long time and then said nothing, which was how he said most things.

When the rains came again, the lotus opened over the water in the shape of that half-circle, and the novices, without being asked, set their stones along the pond's edge in the same curve. Anselm watched them from the gate with his bowl in his lap. The elephant had left a lesson where the young would have to bend down to find it, and that, he thought, was the only kind of lesson worth keeping.