Black and grey ornate elephant tattoo with a pink lotus flower on its head, placed on the upper back near the shoulder blade.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornate elephant with lotus on the upper back

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A decorative elephant with a raised trunk is shown in a tattoo on the upper back. Its body is filled with patterned ornament, including circular motifs, scalloped bands and fine swirls, drawn in bold outlines with grey shading. A small pink lotus flower sits on top of its head, and the only colour in the piece comes from that flower.

Back Elephant Lotus Flower Mandala Pattern Ornament Trunk

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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

The drone reaches the sluice gate each morning at first light, grey as wet slate, its trunk folded like a fern. You were told it was built to haul silt off the drowned platforms, and that the ornament on its flanks is a fault of the factory, a press stamp nobody bothered to scrub away. You stopped believing that years ago. Nobody makes a mistake out of scallops and rings.

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Each dusk you climb the cistern ladder with a tin of ochre and a brush cut from an old broom, and you go over the circles that have flaked. The grey eats everything down here: sea salt, sulphur rain, the long dim hours when the lamps are cut to save the cells. Your grandmother kept one pot of rose madder wrapped in oilcloth under the floorboards. When you found it after her funeral it was so pink it hurt to look at. You used it once, on the lotus at the crown of the trunk, and the drone lifted its head to the lamp as if it had been waiting for permission.

The lotus is the only colour left on the whole machine. Ade from the lower sluices looked at it for a long while last week, then spat into the channel and asked why you could not leave it plain, because a bright thing draws the scavengers. You said nothing. That night you climbed up with the last of the rose madder and painted a second flower on the haunch, small, where nobody standing on the bank would think to look.

At dawn the drone went down the channel with its load of silt, and the cloud tore open over the water. The first lotus caught the sun, then the second, two small pink fires moving away over the grey, and for a moment the whole river seemed to remember what colour was for.