Black ink tattoo of an elephant covered in mandala, paisley and floral patterns on the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornate elephant on upper arm

Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A side-facing elephant fills the frame, its body and trunk decorated with mandala medallions, paisley shapes, flowers and zigzag bands. The linework is fine and the detail is built up with dotted stippling and solid areas of black ink. The tattoo sits centrally on a bare upper arm against a dark blue top, and the photograph is sharp with soft, even lighting.

Upper arm Elephant Mandala Paisley Flower Zigzag Dot Pattern

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

Sit closer, you with the cough. The road to Jaisalmer was never the road you think it was, not in my grandmother's day. It ran through sand the colour of old bread, and a painter named Hamid Lal walked it with a grey elephant called Mumtaz, who had been handed to him as payment of a debt by a rajah who had nothing else to give.

Keep reading

Mumtaz was ordinary until the painter took his brushes to her. Each evening, while the sun slid behind the dunes, Hamid sat on an upturned crate and worked her hide with ink made from lamp soot and camel fat. He drew a mandala on her shoulder for the day's heat, paisley vines curling down her forelegs, marigolds at her knees, and zigzag bands like the ripples a wind leaves on a water trough. He dotted her with a bone stylus, thousands of tiny points, until she seemed woven out of night.

By the third month the villages came out to see her. A boy in Pokaran offered his only goat for one flower on her flank. A widow wept at the gate, and Hamid drew her husband's initials inside a medallion that no one else could read. The painter began to believe the patterns held the road together, and that if he stopped, the dunes would take it back.

On the last night before the border, Mumtaz lay down in the sand and would not rise. Hamid lit the lamp, expecting thorns in her feet, and found instead a small closed circle he had never drawn, perfect as a stone set in her hide. He laughed, then wept, and at dawn he understood that the patterns had never been decoration. She had carried the road's map on her skin, and now the road had its map back.