Elephant head in a geometric circle on upper arm

Geometric · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A realistic elephant head in profile sits inside a large open circle, with its trunk curling down toward the lower part of the design. Below it, thin straight lines, dotted arcs and a smaller circle form a geometric framework, and a short number is set into the dotted ring. The work uses fine lines and stippled shading in black ink on pale skin, with no colour.

Geometric Dotwork Realism Upper arm Elephant Circle Geometric line Dotted circle

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 island had one elephant, and nobody could say where she had come from. Some said a ship had carried her as a calf and lost her overboard, others that the sea had washed her up after a storm. What the fishermen agreed on was that she walked the bay every morning at low water, touching each fish-weir post with the tip of her trunk, and that she never walked the same line twice.

Keep reading

Her keeper was a widow called Orla Breck, who mended nets on the slip. She kept a tally in chalk on the boathouse wall, one stroke for each morning, and by the time the tide turned the strokes had reached a number that nobody liked to say aloud. Two thousand six hundred and two mornings. Each year the water had come a little further up the shingle, and the old posts that had once stood dry now stood in the sea.

One grey morning the elephant stopped at the last post and would not go on. She lowered her trunk and drew a slow ring in the wet sand, round and round, until the ring closed on itself. Then she drew a straight line down from it to the sea, and another beside it, and she pressed a row of small holes along the curve with the tip of her trunk.

Orla walked up the slip and looked at the ring for a long time. Then she went back to the boathouse, took down the chalk, and began to carry the nets up the hill, one bundle at a time, while the elephant stood at the edge of the water and watched the tide come in over her marks.