Colour tattoo of a geometric elephant with pink, yellow and blue watercolour-style fills, on a shoulder.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Geometric elephant on a shoulder

Geometric · Shoulder · Colour · Photo

A faceted, geometric elephant facing left is outlined in thin black lines and filled with soft pink, yellow, blue and green washes. The shading is smooth, with the colour fading softly within each triangular section. The tattoo sits centrally on a shoulder against a plain grey top, with the image cropped close to the skin.

Geometric Shoulder Elephant 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

The rain had been at the stalls since before dawn, and Mrs Okonedo's paper went soft at the corners before anyone had bought a sheet. She sold folding paper from a trestle at the end of Cattle Row, the cheap sort the schoolchildren wanted, and in nineteen years nobody had ever asked her for an elephant.

Keep reading

Then a boy with a wet cap stopped and asked her to make one. When she said she had no elephant paper, he laughed and said any paper would do, if she folded it right. So she took a square of grey and creased it along a line she had not used since her mother's day, a ridge down the back, a long fold for the trunk, and she pressed each edge flat with her thumbnail until the shape stood up on the wet wood like something that had walked out of the weather.

She had a tin of watercolour pans under the counter, kept for her grandson, who never came any more. She dampened her finger and touched pink where the sun would have been, yellow along the flank, blue for the river, green for the reeds. The rain did the rest. It ran into the creases and each facet held its own colour, bleeding a little at the edges, so that the elephant looked lit from inside. The boy took it without paying and walked off down the row with his cap dripping.

The next week there were eleven of them on the trestle, none of them paid for and none of them folded by her hand. She left a dish out for the coins, and the rain filled it to the brim.