Fine line white ink tattoo of an elephant with a heartbeat trace running beneath it, placed on the thigh.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Elephant and heartbeat line on a thigh

Fine line · Thigh · Colour · Photo

A white ink outline of an elephant with its trunk raised sits above a continuous heartbeat style trace that runs across the skin. The linework is thin and even, with the ink showing as a pale line against the reddened skin around it. The composition is centred on the tattoo, with a dark fabric edge visible at the top of the frame.

Fine line Thigh Elephant Heartbeat Ecg line Outline

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 paper came off the drum in a long grey tongue, and I fed it through my fingers the way other women sorted buttons. The infirmary had given me the cardiograph when they got their new machine, a shilling and a promise to keep it out of the scrap yard. Now it sat in the back of Pim's Travelling Menagerie, wedged between the straw bales and the bucket of carrots meant for Nell.

Keep reading

Nell was the last elephant Pim owned, a grey old cow with one cracked tusk and a habit of lifting her trunk whenever the band struck up in the next field. Pim wanted to sell her to a man from Margate who paid in notes. I wanted proof she was failing, so I hooked a pen to the stylus, laid the leads against her great warm flank with a wet cloth, and waited for her to settle. Her line came out jagged at first, then slow and even, a ridge of small mountains that rose whenever the wind changed.

Through August the sheets stacked up in a biscuit tin. Pim read them upside down and said they looked like the coast at Whitstable. I told him they looked like a heart that had decided to stay put.

On the last night in Brannock's field, I took the top sheet, pressed it flat on the damp grass, and drew a little elephant above the trace in white chalk, trunk raised the way Nell held it when she was content. Then I rolled the paper and tucked it into her halter. The line below ran on in the lamplight, steady, because someone had to keep it going.