Sketch-style black and grey elephant head with pale blue triangles and water droplets, tattooed on a person's ribs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Geometric elephant head on the ribs

Geometric · Ribs · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows an elephant head in profile, with its eye, tusks and trunk drawn in fine, overlapping lines and light stippled shading. Pale blue triangles and a few falling droplets sit behind and below the head, and loose circular arcs run across the design. Black and grey linework dominates, with the blue used as a restrained accent against the lighter skin tone.

Geometric Fine line Ribs Elephant Triangle Geometric shape Water droplet Circle

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 are the one who gets up before the rain, because someone has to walk Matilda to the water before the lorries come. The field at Ashby Fen is grey with wet, and the big top has already lost two guy ropes to the wind. Your boots are full of cold. Matilda waits at the flap of the menagerie wagon with her head low, the way she has since the spring, when the vet from Boston said her feet were worn past mending and the owner said nothing at all.

Keep reading

The circus has shrunk to eleven people, a generator, and a stack of posters that still promise a hundred performers under three hundred yards of canvas. Nobody has read the posters in years. You take the rope from Gerald, who has not slept, and turn her towards the lane. She lifts her trunk and the drops run off its tip and fall onto the tarmac in small dark circles, one, then another, as if she were counting the lamp posts out loud.

At the ford the water is high and the colour of pewter. Matilda goes in to her knees and stops, and for a long minute you stand on the bank with the rope slack in your hands, watching the sky break into triangles of pale blue between the clouds. You think about the ring, its perfect circle of sawdust, how she used to step into it and bow, and how every child on the front row went quiet. You think about how a thing can be measured exactly and still come to nothing.

She drinks, then lifts her head and blows a long spray over the water. When you turn back, the big top is a grey pyramid on the hill, folded and pegged, waiting for the lorries. Gerald is already standing at the gate with his hands in his pockets. Matilda starts for home without being asked, and you let the rope go loose and follow her, leaving the ford's wet rings spreading behind you until the rain finds them again.