Black and grey realism tattoo of an elephant with a raised trunk and mandala patterns on its body, on an upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornate elephant on an upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey elephant with its trunk raised in a curl, with a small feather above the head. The body and legs are decorated with ornamental mandala-style patterns and dotted borders. The elephant is shaded with soft greys for the head and ears, with bold outlines around the patterned areas, and it fills the centre of the frame against a blurred blue-grey background.

Realism Geometric Upper arm Elephant Trunk Mandala Feather 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

Sit closer, you with the wet sandals, and mind the embers. Every caravan that crosses the salt flats has a story about the elephant that walked out of the hills with a feather tucked behind its ear, and I will tell you the true one, because my grandmother told it to me and she never once lied to a child.

Keep reading

There was a potter in Sarnath named Divya who painted everything she made. Pots, bowls, the lids of her children's boxes. She painted circles inside circles and dotted rings that never quite closed, because she said a closed ring was a thing that had finished, and she did not want her work to finish. One morning a grey elephant came down the road from the hills, its skin stippled like a river stone, and it stopped at her gate and would not go on until she came out.

She had nothing to give it but a wet jar of ochre. So she painted. She climbed the stone wall and dipped her brush and worked up its legs in bands of diamonds, across its flanks in loops like the ones on her best platters, and round the rim of each ear she set a border of small dots. The elephant stood patient as a monument. When she was finished, it lifted its trunk high, curled it into a question mark, and a grey feather drifted down from nowhere and caught in the fold of its ear.

The elephant bowed to her, and she understood it was a gift of sorts, though she did not know yet that she had been paid in a wholly different coin. From that day her bowls sold to every merchant from Taxila to the sea, and no one could copy the rings, because they never closed. And if you ever find a feather of that colour on the road, do not pick it up. Leave it for the next potter.