Black ink line drawing of a small elephant filled with mandala and zentani-style patterns, surrounded by flowers and leaves, shown as a tattoo design.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Patterned elephant with mandala motifs

Black and grey · Flash

A small elephant standing side on, with its body, trunk and legs filled with dense black ink patterns of mandalas, scrolls, dots and stripes. Small flowers, leaves and dotted motifs sit around the figure on a plain white background. The linework is uniform and bold, with no shading or colour, and the design is centred with generous white space around it.

Elephant Mandala Flower Leaf Dot Pattern Scroll

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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

Listen, and I will tell it the way my grandmother told it to me, sitting on the back step with the washing going stiff on the line. There was a small elephant in the hill town of Varnley, the year the cinema flooded and the vicar's bicycle went into the canal. Nobody knew where the elephant had come from. It was simply there one morning, standing by the well with its ears spread like two dinner plates, and it had painted itself all over with patterns, circles inside circles, scrolls curling off its legs, little dots like spilt pepper.

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The children wanted to rub the patterns off with their spit and their hankies, but the elephant only laughed through its trunk and told them each dot was a door. Behind every door, it said, was a flower that had been forgotten by somebody who needed it. So the children began to look. Mrs Okafor found a marigold in the dot above her kitchen sink that she had lost the summer her husband went to sea. Old Tom Pelling found his mother's laugh inside a leaf that curled round the elephant's left foreleg, and he sat down on the cobbles and wept like a boy.

When the rains came and the canal rose, the elephant walked slowly down to the water and stood in it up to its knees, and the patterns on its legs began to lift away like smoke. People gathered on the bridge to see. But the elephant turned, looked at them with its small shining eye, and asked them only to look a little longer at the flowers they had found. And that is why, to this day, Varnley people still count the dots on their doorsteps before they go out, in case one of them is a door.