Colour tattoo of the cartoon elephant Dumbo sitting with his ears spread, in a traditional style on the lower leg.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dumbo the elephant tattoo on a calf

Traditional · Calf · Colour · Photo

A cartoon elephant, Dumbo, sits with his large ears spread out and a yellow feather in a small red bow. The outlines are bold black, with grey shading on the body and soft red and pink shading behind the ears. The design sits in the centre of the frame on smooth skin against a teal surface, with part of another tattoo visible at the top right.

Traditional Calf Elephant Cartoon character Feather Bow

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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

Sit yourself down before the kettle boils dry, and mind the bread, it's for the middle watch. You want to know why there's a yellow feather pinned above my stove? Then peel those spuds properly and listen, because I'll not tell it twice.

Keep reading

Back on the Marigold, in the year the coal went up, there was a ship's boy called Tobias Pell, with ears like a pair of spread mainsails. The hands called him Flap, and worse. He'd sit on an upturned bucket scrubbing pans with his head down, chewing his lip raw. His mother had stitched a red bow to his collar for luck and tucked a yellow feather into it, off a gull she'd seen drop onto the quay. He swore it let him fly, and nobody believed him.

Then a squall came down off the Dogger Bank like a dropped anvil. The main topsail parted, the boom swung, and Tobias was up the ratlines when the rigging gave way under him. He fell. The wind got under those ears and lifted him clean off the shrouds, turned him over twice, and set him down on the hatch cover as neat as a folded shirt. Not a bone broken. The bosun went quiet for once in his life, and nobody laughed after that.

The feather came down on my galley table the next morning, wet and bent at the tip. I pinned it up there myself. Now, the spuds, and don't you dare go near that bread.