A full elephant drawn in profile — trunk curling at the top. Elephants once roamed central China; as they vanished, people knew them from drawings, and 象 slid from the animal to 'image, appearance'.
大象 elephant, 印象 impression, 想象 to imagine, 气象 weather patterns. Han Feizi noted people reconstructed elephants from bones and pictures — imagining from an image: exactly what 想象 still means.
Trunk, tusks, four legs — the ELEPHANT that became an IMAGE.
想象 'to imagine' preserves a 2,000-year-old story: knowing elephants only from pictures, imagination itself was named after the elephant.