Black and white line drawing of an elephant head with butterfly wings for ears, framed by daisies and roses, shown as a tattoo design.

Elephant with butterfly wings and flowers

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A front-facing elephant head with large butterfly wings in place of ears, decorated with a drop-shaped jewel pendant and a central flower on the forehead. The wings are filled with solid black and white dots, while the head and trunk use fine outlines with some stippled and hatched detail. The whole motif sits inside a wreath of daisies and roses, drawn in black ink only on a plain white background.

Botanical Elephant Butterfly Flower Daisy Rose Jewel Wreath

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

Brother Anselm had the illuminating of the psalter, and I had the garden, which is why it fell to me to find the animal when it got loose. It came in through the cloister door the week the abbot's brother arrived with the elephant, a grey beast led on a rope through the Lincolnshire mud and bought, so the story went, from a bankrupt fair in Boston. Nobody had told the monks that an elephant would need feeding, and the rose beds by the infirmary were stripped to stalks before Vespers.

Keep reading

The elephant stood in the lower field for a fortnight with a daisy garland tied round its brow by the novices, who had decided it was a saint. Its ears were the trouble. They were not ears at all but two great wings, black and white and spotted like the fritillaries we pressed in our herbal, and when the wind came off the fens they lifted and the whole yard smelled of crushed mint.

Anselm drew it every evening on vellum, and every evening he got the wings wrong. "Too much like a butterfly," he said, scraping at the margin. "An elephant should be heavier than that." I told him the creature did not seem to mind. On the last morning, before the wagon came for it, I found the animal standing alone against the wall, trunk lifted over the stones, and tucked in its curl was a single white flower I had not planted. I put it in my sleeve, and I have it still, pressed flat between the pages where Anselm never thought to look.