Black ink drawing of the word elephant in hand-drawn lettering, with the letters shaped to form an elephant's body, trunk and legs on a grey background.

Elephant lettering design in black ink

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

The image shows the word elephant written in bold, hand-drawn black lettering on a plain grey background. The letters are stretched and arranged so that the final letters form the elephant's head, body and legs, with a curved line for the trunk. The ink is solid black with no shading or colour, and the composition is centred with generous space around the design.

Lettering Elephant Word Lettering

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 hardware man on Quay Street wanted his name in plain capitals across the fascia, and I told him plain capitals would sell him nothing. What I had instead was a sixpence and a torn jotter page from the boy at number nine, who had drawn an elephant with its trunk curled like a question mark and asked me to write the word for it. Eight letters, he said, which is seven more than a sign needs.

Keep reading

So I wrote it stretched. The first e I lifted high to become the tip of the trunk, the l I bent down into the neck, and the p and h I dropped to make the front and back legs, the arch of the h hooking up to form a belly. My brush ran dry twice, and the second time I thinned the black with a drop of linseed and a drop of spit, which my old master would have struck me for. The a and n took the back in one long sweep, and the t I let trail off into a tail no thicker than wet thread.

The boy came on Saturday with his mother and stood on the step with his hands clasped behind him. He read it aloud letter by letter, then again faster, and then he laughed the way children do when a thing has come out exactly as they hoped. His mother asked what I charged. I said nothing, and the boy insisted on paying the sixpence anyway, because, he said, a thing that is both a word and a beast is worth a bun.

The hardware man never did get his capitals. He stood under the new board for a week, squinting up at it, and then he came in and asked whether I could do his name as a giraffe. I told him I would need a bigger sixpence. Every morning since, I have watched someone on that street stop, tilt their head, and find the animal before the word.