Grey ornamental elephant tattoo with a pink lotus at the raised trunk, on the upper back near the shoulder blade.

Ornate elephant with lotus on upper back

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A standing elephant covered in decorative patterns, including floral medallions, scalloped bands and scroll-like motifs, is shown with its trunk raised towards a pink lotus flower. The body and patterns are rendered in black and grey shading with bold outlines, while the lotus is the only colour, in soft pinks and reds. The tattoo fills the centre of the frame against smooth skin, with the shoulder blade visible at the top.

Back Elephant Lotus Flower Trunk Ornament Pattern Medallion

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody bid on the elephant until the auctioneer lifted its cloth and found a lotus wedged in the curl of its raised trunk, pink as the inside of a shell. Ada had come for the cracked bread board. She raised her paddle for the elephant instead, two pounds, and the room laughed, because the thing was black with age and patterned all over like a cushion nobody sat on.

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At home she set it on the sill above the sink, where the late sun came through the apple trees behind the fence and laid their shadows across the scrolls and medallions. Her father had carved animals like this before he came to Kent, she remembered, and he had told her each ornament on the flanks meant something: a flower for a safe road, a scallop for a full table, a swirl for a letter he never posted. She had never asked which one the elephant was.

In September the wasps found the windfalls and the air turned sweet and heavy. Ada went out with a bucket and dug under the cherry tree, where her father had buried a biscuit tin the year before he died. Inside, wrapped in newspaper gone brown at the folds, was a second lotus, grey and brittle, and beneath it a folded note in his square capitals. It said only that the trunk was meant to point at whoever was coming home.

She went back indoors and set the old flower beside the new one on the windowsill. Then she left the back door open, and let the wasps have the apples.