Black and white photo of a fine line outline of an elephant with its trunk raised, tattooed on the nape of a woman's neck below her hair.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Fine line elephant on the nape

Fine line · Neck · Black and grey · Photo

The photo shows the back of a woman's neck with her dark hair pulled up, and a small tattoo of an elephant outline sits at the centre of the nape. The elephant is drawn in thin, single black linework with its trunk curling upwards, and a tiny separate shape appears above the trunk. A fine silver chain runs across the neck, and the plain dark background and white top keep the focus on the tattoo.

Fine line Neck Elephant Outline Neck Chain

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 snow had closed the high pass twice that winter, so when the grey elephant came up the track from the lowland side, Ilse Varga dropped her basket of turnips and stared. It walked slowly, as if the mountain were a stair it had been told to climb, and it held its trunk up into the wind the way a man holds a lantern to read a sign.

Keep reading

The carters at the inn said it belonged to a merchant who had died in the valley, and that nobody had come to claim the beast. Ilse did not believe them. She fed it the last of her bread, and it curled its trunk around her wrist with a care that made her eyes sting. Every evening after that it climbed to the saddle of the pass and stood there facing east, and every morning it came down again for the turnips she left out.

When the thaw came, the elephant did not come down. Ilse climbed up with a lantern and found it beside the cairn, trunk raised, looking not at the valley but at the sky, where a single star had come out above the ridge. It made a low sound, not quite a bellow, and the star seemed to hang there a moment longer than stars do.

The carters say the pass has been open every winter since. Ilse still leaves turnips at the cairn, and when the wind drops she says she can hear something walking slowly on the far side, going home.