Line drawing of an elephant head filled with mandala and paisley patterns in blue and purple gradient ink, shown as a tattoo design on a white background.

Ornate mandala elephant head design

Colour · Flash

An elephant head faces forward, with its ears, forehead, trunk and tusks filled with dense mandala, paisley and floral ornament. The linework is fine pen work with stippled shading that fades from blue at the top to purple at the lower trunk. The subject is centred on a plain white background with no body part shown.

Elephant Mandala Paisley Floral Tusk Trunk

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The elephant came down the lane the week the Cox apples were ready, and no one in Little Hadley could agree where it had walked from. Nan Pruett said it had stepped out of the mist on Brook Meadow, all ears and blue ornament, and her grandson swore the lines on its forehead were the same as the carving over the lychgate. Nobody argued with the trunk, which curled over the orchard gate and waited there until Tobias Mell came out with his lantern.

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Tobias had kept the orchard since his father's hands gave out, and he had no patience for beasts. 'You'll have the lot,' he told it, but the elephant only lowered its great head and looked at the ground beneath the old Cox tree, where the windfalls lay split and bruised. It ate none of them. Instead it knelt, slow as a church bell, and pressed one tusk into the soil. When it rose, there was a row of small round holes in the earth, each the width of a pip, and every hole had a green shoot pushing through.

Tobias stood with the lantern and understood the bargain before it was asked. The old trees had been dying since the blight, and the village had let them go, the way villages let things go. Each autumn the elephant would come, take what had fallen, and carry the seeds in the folds of its patterned skin to the ground where nothing else would grow. Tobias did not ask why. He fetched a basket and filled it with the windfalls the rest of the village had kicked into the ditch.

By spring the blossom had come back on the Cox, pale and stubborn. Tobias never saw the elephant again, but the grass where it had knelt had grown thick and green in the shape of a lotus. On the wide grey trunk of the oldest tree, a ring of blue lichen had spread around the bark, as neat as a ornament drawn with a fine pen.