Black ornamental elephant tattoo with a patterned body in blackwork style, on the left ribs of a woman photographed in a mirror.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornate elephant tattoo on the ribs

Blackwork · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A woman photographed from behind in a mirror selfie, with her phone held up over her face. A black elephant with dense, ornamental patterning sits on her left side, below a black lace bra strap. The ink is solid black with fine detail in the body and a mandala-like pattern, set against warm, softly lit skin and tiled walls.

Blackwork Ribs Elephant Ornamental

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 elephant had been carved from teak by Mehar's grandfather, and he never let anyone keep it on a shelf where the sun reached. Dust got into the spiral of its blanket, he said, and dust was how a thing forgot what it was for.

Keep reading

The summer the well went dry, Mehar's brother wrapped the carving in a cloth bag and took it to the station at Jodhpur, meaning to sell it to a man who collected such things. Mehar followed with the coins she had saved in a biscuit tin. On the platform she unwrapped one corner and saw that the patterning was cut so deep that light fell through the rings and laid small bright circles across the concrete.

Inside the hollow belly, wrapped in a strip of blue cotton, she found a folded paper in her grandfather's careful script. It was a list of everyone who had left the village, each name cut small beside a dot in the pattern. Beside the last empty dot he had written her brother's name in pencil, as if he already knew where it would end up.

Mehar closed the bag. The train whistled and pulled out without them. She carried the elephant home in the heat, bumping against her hip, and set it back in the shade by the well, where the light could come through its rings and find the floor.