Small colour tattoo of a folk-art style elephant decorated with blue, yellow and red patterns, on the top of a foot beside a coin for scale.

Patterned elephant on the top of a foot

Other · Colour · Photo

A small tattoo of an elephant in profile sits on the top of a foot, with its trunk curled down and its body covered in painted-style patterns including flowers, dots and scrolls. The linework is bold and clean with flat fills, and the palette uses blue, yellow, red and touches of green. A two-dollar coin rests beside the design to show scale, against a pale, glossy surface.

Other Elephant Flower Pattern Dot Scroll

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The brush was too thick for the eye of the elephant, and Lakshmi told me so before I had even wetted it. 'Thin it with your breath,' she said, 'or the poor beast will look as if it has been sat on.' I blew into the little pot of indigo until it ran like cloud off the rim, and she nodded, which from her was praise.

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We were painting the gate of the Patel house, the one with the crooked lintel that faces the well. Lakshmi had a rule for elephants and she repeated it while she worked: the body carries the year. Flowers for the harvest, dots for the rain that came late, scrolls for the river that ran past the temple and never once stopped for anybody. The yellow was turmeric mixed with a little glue from the tamarind tree, and the red was crushed lac that the dyers sold us for a pinch of rice.

Old Mr Patel had owned an elephant once, a grey female called Sundari who had carried his bride up the hill. She had died the winter before, and he wanted her on the gate so the children would know she had been there. Lakshmi painted her in profile with the trunk curled low, because that was how Sundari drank at the cistern, slow and careful, as if the water might be taken back.

When the last dot was dry, Mr Patel came out with his tea and stood before the gate for a long time. He did not say anything. He reached up and touched the blue flower on the shoulder, and his thumb came away with a smudge the shape of a petal. Lakshmi laughed and told him the paint was still soft, and he said that was all right, he had always liked to leave a mark.