Black ink drawing of an ornate elephant head in dotwork and mandala patterns, with a shaded rose in place of the ear, on white paper.

Ornate elephant with rose design

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

A black ink drawing of an elephant head and curled trunk, with the eye, tusk and forehead filled with dense mandala-style patterns of dots, swirls and scallops. A shaded rose sits within the large ear, drawn with fine hatching and stippling. The work is entirely in black ink on white paper, with no colour, and is shown beside a Micron 05 pen.

Dotwork Botanical Elephant Rose Mandala Eye Tusk Trunk Swirl Dot

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 came through Hallam's Orchard on Tuesday, two days late, with the rain still on her back. Mr Vance had her walking the lane between the Bramleys with a rope on one foot, and every child in Culver End was lined along the wall to see her. Her ears are the strange part. Someone has painted them with dots and scrolls, the same as the mandalas Aunt Ida used to stitch onto our tablecloths, and inside the left one, grown up out of the pattern as if it had been there first, is a rose. I asked the keeper who had done it. He said the girl had been paid in apples and never asked for anything else.

Keep reading

Her trunk curls up like a fern, and when she lifts it the tusk catches the light, a long grey shell of a thing. I gave her the windfalls from under the Keswick tree. She took them one at a time and set each on the ground before she ate it, very neatly, the way you would lay out spoons for guests.

Mother says I am not to go near the fairground again, but I have been thinking about the girl who painted her. Nobody in the village would tell me her name. I think she did the rose, because the petals are drawn so carefully, each one lifting a little at the edge, as if they had been left out in the sun and were considering opening further.

The keeper says they leave on Monday for the coast. I am going to walk down with the last of the pears in a basket and see if anyone is still there to take them. Come home by the end of the month if you can. The orchard is heavy this year and there is no one to pick it but us.

Your sister, Nell