Black ink elephant covered in geometric patterns, tattooed on the side of a person's ribs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornate patterned elephant on the ribs

Blackwork · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A large elephant facing forward, filled with dense geometric and mandala-like patterns in black ink. The linework is bold, with solid black areas and fine patterned detail across the head, ears, legs and trunk. The tattoo sits on a bare midriff against a grey top and dark trousers, with no colour ink visible.

Blackwork Geometric Ribs Elephant Mandala Pattern Ornament Animal

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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 wooden block came out of the lorry's lining with a sound like a cupboard door, and I knew before I unwrapped it that the man across the desk would lie about it. Everyone lies about blocks. They are heavy, they are old, and at our crossing a carved printing block is either a family heirloom or the start of a smuggling case, depending on how tired I am by four o'clock.

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This one was an elephant, square-headed, its ears filled with fan-shaped rings and little diamonds cut so finely I had to tilt the lamp to follow them. He said his grandfather had cut it in a village below the pass, where they printed cloth for weddings and for nothing else. I asked him to press his thumb to the corner, and a thin ridge of old ink came away on the glass. Black, not the red I had expected. Someone had been making elephants with that much care for a long time.

My mother keeps a shawl in her chest with the same elephant printed across it, its trunk curled into a spiral, the body crowded with patterns that repeat until the eye aches. She bought it in that valley the year before the border was moved. I never asked her how she came to own it. I asked the man instead, in the scraps of language I keep for work, whether his grandfather had ever cut one with the trunk turned the other way.

He smiled and said there was only one correct way to cut an elephant. Then he rewrapped the block, paid the duty without arguing, and I stamped his form with the wrong hand because my right was still stained from the ink. I washed at the sink for a long time. The ink had faded in the water to the grey of a sky before rain, and the little elephant was still there on my thumb, facing the wrong way.