Black and grey dotwork tattoo of a long-legged elephant carrying a stack of cubes on its back, on the outer calf.

Elephant with stacked cubes on a calf

Dotwork · Calf · Black and grey · Photo

A long-legged elephant wearing an ornate patterned blanket carries a tall stack of cubes and a small sphere on its back. The elephant is rendered in fine stippled dotwork, with the cubes shaded in graded dots for a three-dimensional effect. The design runs down the outer calf of a leg in black ink against a plain background.

Dotwork Calf Elephant Cube Sphere Pyramid Animal

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

You learn the tide at Gorran Hythe by watching the elephant, not the clock. It comes down the slip at first grey light, long legs folding into the mud like the struts of a crane, carrying on its back the stacked crates the harbour board insists on calling the catch store. Nobody remembers who painted the blanket on it. The pattern is diamonds nested inside diamonds, and Ruth Penhallow, who has mended nets on this quay for forty years, says it is a map of the bay drawn by someone who had only heard about the bay.

Keep reading

Your first week, Ruth tells you to count the cubes before you touch a single one. Thirty-one, then thirty-two, then the small sphere balanced on the very top, which might be a glass float or a drop of rain that forgot to fall. You count them every morning and the number is never the same twice. She says that is not the elephant's fault, and that the bay has always been a little bigger on the days you are looking for it.

One morning the boat is late and the elephant waits at the bottom of the slip, swaying gently, while you load the herring. You reach up to steady the top crate and the sphere rolls off, bounces once on the wet stone, and goes into the water. The elephant stops. Its legs tremble, its trunk curls down toward the surface and comes up empty. You wade in to your knees, cold to the bone, and find the sphere lying in a fringe of weed. When you hand it up, the elephant takes it with great care, sets it back on the stack, and the whole tower leans, shudders and holds. Only then does the sea turn and come up the slip to meet the boat.