Sketch-style grey elephant tattoo with red and orange balloons, spanning the shoulder and upper arm.

Elephant with balloons on upper arm

Shoulder · Mixed · Photo

A grey elephant floats upwards with its trunk curling forward, held aloft by red and orange balloons on thin trailing strings. The shading is built from loose, sketchy hatching and dark outlines, with red and orange wash accents added over the grey. The design wraps across the shoulder and upper arm, shown in two close photographs of the same tattoo.

Shoulder Upper arm Elephant Balloon String Sketch

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 elephant had been meant for the wedding, but the rain came early and the marquee poles sank into the wet lawn at Hollin Farm, so Mabel Crewe's sister sent the bridesmaids out to the orchard with their skirts hitched and their shoes in their hands. Nobody thought to check the balloons. Old Tobias from the village had blown up forty of them the night before, red and orange, and tied them to a bundle of string by the gate, and that was where the elephant came from, though nobody could afterwards say who had cut the string.

Keep reading

It rose slowly over the hedge. Its trunk curled forward as if it were sniffing out the weather, and its grey ears flapped once, twice, the way the ears of a thing do when it has decided to leave a place for good. The vicar's wife dropped her hymn book. The bridegroom, who had been looking for his cufflinks, came out onto the step and stood there with one sleeve hanging.

Mabel did not run. She walked to the orchard wall, took off her gloves, and held up her bouquet, which was the only thing she had brought from the house that was not wet. The elephant drifted down the length of the sky, unhurried, and lowered one foot onto the crown of the nearest apple tree. It stayed there a while, looking at her with a small black eye. Then it stepped off again, quite politely, and went on east towards the hills, the balloons bobbing above it like a pair of lamps someone had forgotten to put out.