Black and grey shaded elephant tattoo on the side of a bare foot, with a beaded cord bracelet on the other ankle.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Elephant tattoo on a foot

Other · Black and grey · Photo

Two bare feet rest together on a white sheet with a small dot pattern. A shaded elephant, seen in profile with its trunk curled, sits on the outer side of the right foot. The linework is dark and the greys are soft and graduated, with no colour ink.

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

Mrs Abernethy had the stall nearest the fish market gate, and in the rain she kept her wares under a tarpaulin that smelled of tar and last week's herring. Dorothy Fenn came down the cobbles that Tuesday with a shilling in her glove and a question she had been carrying since breakfast. Was the little grey elephant still for sale, the one with the curled trunk that had sat on the windowsill for a month?

Keep reading

Mrs Abernethy did not answer straight away. She wiped her hands on her apron and lifted the elephant from its nest of newspaper. It was carved from a single piece of lime wood, sanded smooth, and someone had worked the ridges of its ears so finely that the rain beaded on them. "Carved by a sailor who came back from Ceylon with nothing but his knife," she said. "He wanted the trunk to curl the way a hand reaches for a rope. I told him it would never sell. It sold the first hour."

Dorothy turned it over. Underneath, someone had scratched a date and two initials, worn almost away by thumbs. She paid the shilling and tucked the elephant into her coat, against her ribs, where it stayed warm.

Halfway up the hill she stopped under the chapel wall to shelter, and the rain came sideways off the sea. She thought of her father's tin box of buttons, of the sailor's knife he had never owned, of how a small grey thing could carry a whole coastline in its curl. When she got home she set the elephant on the sill again, trunk up, facing the street, and left the shutter open so the rain could find it.

More like this

Small shaded grey elephant tattoo on the side of a foot, with a cord anklet on the other ankle, against a polka dot sheet.
Grey elephant tattoo on a foot
Black and grey realism tattoo of two hands reaching towards each other across the skin of a limb.
Two reaching hands in black and grey
Black and grey dotwork mandala tattoo on a wrist, with diamond and dot linework running down the back of the hand and fingers.
Mandala wrist and hand tattoo
Black and grey dotwork tattoo of a hand making the ILY sign, placed on the ankle of a bare foot.
Sign language hand on an ankle
Fine line black ink tattoo of two stick figures joined by a taut string, one figure on each ankle.
Stick figures joined by a string on two ankles
Black and grey realism tattoo of two hands reaching towards each other on the inner forearm.
Two reaching hands tattoo on a forearm
Close-up of a black ornamental mandala tattoo with lotus-like petals and dot details on the inner wrist and forearm.
Ornamental mandala tattoo on a wrist
Black fine line dreamcatcher tattoo with small birds on the inner wrist of a raised hand.
Dreamcatcher and birds on a wrist
Black blackwork tattoo of gothic cathedral spires covering the tops of both feet and the toes.
Gothic cathedral spires across both feet
Black and grey fine line tattoo of an open book on the inner wrist of a raised hand, against a warm sepia bathroom background.
Open book tattoo on a wrist
Fine line black tattoo of two outlined hands, one reaching up and one open and angled, on the inner upper arm near the elbow.
Two outline hands on an inner upper arm
Close-up of a fine line black script tattoo reading carpe diem on the ankle of a bare foot, resting on white bedding.
Carpe diem script tattoo on an ankle

From the plentytattoo archive, uploaded by a user. Is this your work? Ask for credit or removal.