Black and grey realism tattoo of an elephant head with moth-like wings bearing eyespots, placed centrally on the upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Elephant head with moth wings on upper back

Realism · Back · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows an elephant's head, tusks and trunk at the centre, with large moth or butterfly wings spreading out on either side. Each wing has round eyespot markings. The linework is clean and the shading on the elephant's face and trunk is soft, giving it a dimensional look. The design is entirely black and grey and is centred across the upper back, with the subject's dark reddish-brown hair falling over one shoulder.

Realism Back Elephant Moth Wing Trunk Tusk

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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

Dear Hal, The drawer is open on the bench as I write, and the lamp catches the dust on its lid so it looks like frost. You told me to stop sending photographs of the drawer, so this is only words, and you can read them standing up at the reunion if you like.

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Mrs Pell brought the box in the week before the dinner. Inside, on a bed of cotton wool gone the colour of weak tea, lay a grey elephant's head no bigger than a teacup, tusks cut from something yellow, and two moth wings fanning out from its ears. The label said Elephant, head only, 1911, in a hand that had given up halfway through. I spent three evenings with a loupe, and the wings told me more than the label did. Each one carries a round eyespot, a false eye the size of a farthing, the sort a moth flashes at a bird so it thinks twice before it bites.

The last wing I unpinned on Thursday night, when the building had emptied and the radiators had stopped knocking. I lifted the trunk to check the mount and it weighed almost nothing, as if whoever made it had only meant it to be looked at. Mrs Pell says her husband was a stage hypnotist and kept the thing on his mantelpiece so the audience would watch the wings and not his hands.

So I have written it up as a curiosity and sent it back to her with the cotton wool. Tell Maureen the hall still smells of floor polish, and that I am sorry I was not the one who remembered the raffle. Yours, Frances.