Black and grey elephant tattoo with an ornate patterned body and raised trunk, placed on the side of the ribs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornate elephant on the ribs

Dotwork · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A standing elephant with its trunk raised faces right, its body filled with decorative patterns, including a mandala-like panel on the back and scrollwork along the legs and flank. The outlines are bold and the shading is built up with dense dots and stippled texture. The piece is in black ink and grey tones only, and it sits on the side of the torso with a black lace garment at the top of the frame.

Dotwork Traditional Ribs Elephant Trunk Mandala Ornament Pattern Scrollwork

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

The wooden elephant had been through the scanner twice before Mira Oduya thought to turn it over. Its trunk rose in a clean curve, the stippled flank was dark with lacquer, and the panel on its back was ringed with petals that had been cut so finely they looked printed. The man who owned it, Tomas Ferrand, stood with his papers held flat against the counter as though they might blow away in the draught from the river.

Keep reading

"It was my wife's," he said. "Her sister lives on the other bank. I promised I would take it across before the spring." Mira ran her thumb along the mandala and felt a seam, then a small brass catch. The panel lifted like the lid of a tin. Inside, tied with green thread, lay a bundle of letters, perhaps forty of them, each addressed in a different hand to a name on the far side of Pell Bridge.

The declaration form had a box for everything carried, and a second box asking whether anything was being carried on behalf of another person. Mira looked at the names. Some were crossed out. Some had been written again beside the crossings, in pencil, with the dates of the last known post. She thought of the rules on the wall, which had been written by people who had never stood on this line in February.

She closed the lid until the catch clicked, wrote "carved ornament, personal effects, no duty" in the box, and slid the form back under the glass. "Mind the trunk on the steps," she said. Tomas lifted the elephant against his chest and walked out across the white line, its raised trunk pointing at the far bank as though calling someone home.