Black and grey realistic tattoo of two adult elephants and three young walking in a line across the upper back, with stippled shading.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Elephant family walking across upper back

Realism · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A line of two adult elephants and three smaller young elephants walks left to right across the skin, with the trunk of one young elephant touching the tail of the one in front. The elephants are drawn with fine stippled and hatched shading in black ink, giving them texture and depth. The motif sits horizontally across the centre of the frame against a plain light background, with dark hair and a dark top at the edges.

Realism Dotwork Back Elephant

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 dry season had shrunk the water hole to a brown puddle by the time Nandi decided the herd would walk for the hills. Nobody argued. The calves were thin, and the old bull had already stopped at the ridge three days earlier, which everyone understood without anyone saying it.

Keep reading

The rule was simple and the young ones knew it by heart. Each calf kept a trunk resting on the tail of the one in front, so that no one could drift off in the dust. Mara, the smallest, had the place nearest the back, where the older cow Tomo walked with her ears spread wide like sails. When the sun went down behind the thorn trees, the heat stayed in the ground and the stars came out thick over the plain.

Somewhere past the second dry riverbed Mara lost her grip. A shadow shifted, a hyena laughed far off, and her trunk closed on nothing. She stopped and called, a thin sound that carried no distance at all. Then Tomo's tail swung back toward her, slow and deliberate, brushing her cheek. She reached and wrapped her trunk around it, and the whole line of them moved again, one breath at a time.

They reached the hills before the sky turned grey. Rain had fallen there in the night, and the air smelled of wet stone and crushed grass. Mara walked the last stretch with her trunk still curled around the tail in front of her, and she did not let go until the others had stopped to drink.