Black and grey photo of tattooed legs showing an elephant design and looping script lettering on the thigh, with a hairless cat resting on the knee.

Elephant and script tattoos on legs with a cat

Lettering · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A black and white photograph of bare legs in patterned socks, with a hairless cat sitting on the knee. The tattoos include a large elephant design on the thigh, looping script lettering running down the leg, and a mandala-style design on the forearm of the hand holding the cat. The linework is bold and the image is monochrome, so the shading and ink tones are clearly visible.

Lettering Thigh Calf Forearm Elephant Script Mandala Cat

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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

Now sit still, the lot of you, because the cold's come up off the tip and I'm not telling this twice. The year the travelling show pitched on the cricket field below Cwmllan, there was an elephant called Mabel who had been taught to write her own name. Not with a pen, mind. Old Hughes the farrier held the brush and Mabel pressed her foot to the paper, and the letters came out looping and wild, like smoke off a fire that doesn't want to go out.

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Her keeper was a thin man named Arthur Penhale who had lost two fingers at the Gwyn pit and had no patience left for anyone who lost anything else. Every night after the last house he walked her down past the chapel to the stream, and she drank while he read aloud the letters that came to the caravan. They were all from a woman in Bristol who wrote in a hand so fancy it looked like lace, and not one of them ever said where she was.

The winter the show folded, nobody would take Mabel, so Penhale kept her in the old coal shed behind the Co-op. Eleven weeks of swedes from the allotments and the Bristol letters read aloud by the stove, until the last one came with a single line: Come home, or don't, but stop keeping her alive for me. He burned it in the grate. Mabel stood at the shed door all night with her trunk raised in the frost, facing the hill road.

In March he led her up over the top to the coast road, and the next morning the men going down the shift found a sheet of brown paper nailed to the pit gate. Across it, in looping letters, someone had written the names of every man who ever went under and the hour each one came up again. Underneath, in a smaller hand, was Mabel's foot print in ink. That's all there is. Now get your coats on, and mind the rails going home.