Small fine line tattoo of an outlined elephant with a filled green clover on the outer ankle, with sea foam around the foot.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Elephant and clover on an ankle

Fine line · Ankle · Mixed · Photo

A bare foot and ankle standing in shallow, foamy water, with dark shorts visible above. A small elephant is drawn in thin black outline, with its trunk raised, and a solid green clover sits beside its rear. The composition is close and centred on the ankle, with soft natural light and a pale, blurred background.

Fine line Ankle Elephant Clover Shamrock

Find an artist for this

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 tide has already smoothed your footprints by the time you reach the rocks, and the wooden elephant you carried off the ferry in your coat pocket is starting to lean. You set him down on the wet sand of Skerrow Ness because the boatman said the sea gives back anything you lose, and you have decided to believe him. Gulls argue overhead. Your sister is still shouting about the timetable from the far end of the beach, and the elephant, who came from a gift shop in Tenerife with a chipped trunk, watches the foam slide up toward him as if it has a message.

Keep reading

Nobody on Skerrow Ness has ever seen an elephant. Mrs Dunne at the shop says the island once tried keeping a goat and it took the next boat back. But you walk the lane behind the chapel and find clover in every crack of the stone wall, three leaves each, and at the last cottage a patch grows thick enough to hide a hen. You kneel and count. Four leaves. Then the wind lifts the grey cap off the gatepost and you have to chase it halfway to the harbour.

When you return, the elephant has moved. Not far, only a hand's width up the sand, his trunk raised as though he has caught a scent he means to follow. Beside his back legs a single green clover has come up out of nothing, bright as paint. You tell yourself the tide did it. Your sister says you are daft. The boat horn sounds twice from the pier, so you lift him, brush the sand from his ears and leave the clover where it is.

You never tell her that you picked one leaf anyway and pressed it flat between the pages of the ferry timetable, where it can keep the island's luck for the crossing home.