Black ink drawing of an elephant head filled with geometric patterns, a tattoo design with no body placement shown.

Geometric elephant head design

Geometric · Black and grey · Flash

A front-facing elephant head drawn in fine black pen, with its tusks, trunk and large ears filled with cross-hatching and stippling. The forehead and trunk are packed with triangles, diamonds and zigzag bands, while the ears use shaded texture for contrast. The design sits centred on a plain white background.

Geometric Elephant Geometric pattern Tusk Trunk Triangle Diamond

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 want the elephant story, then sit where the lamp can reach you. My grandmother's grandmother kept a tea shop above the salt sheds in Harrowmouth, and the elephant came up the hill one wet March with a cart full of crates and a boy called Tobiah Penhallow walking beside it, rope in hand. Nobody in the town had seen an elephant. They said it had walked off a ship that never docked, which is the sort of thing harbour folk say when they want to be frightened and warm at once.

Keep reading

The elephant would not go past the chandler's door. It stood with its great ears out like sails and swung its trunk in slow patterns across the cobbles, drawing lines in the wet that the fishermen swore were maps. Old Mrs Quarrie, who could read the tide by the smell of the bell buoy, sat on a barrel and watched those lines for an hour. Then she took her knitting needle and copied them onto the back of a ration card, triangle after triangle, zigzag after zigzag, until the card was full of the thing's own patterns.

When she held it up, the elephant lowered its head and let her trace the diamonds on its brow with one finger. Tobiah said it had never let anyone do that. The town still argues about what happened next, but the card is framed above the till, and every child who reads it sees the same thing: a route through the rocks, drawn by something that had come a very long way to show us where the water was deep.