Two black and grey geometric tattoos on a pair of calves, a shaded panda on the left leg and a fine line origami-style elephant on the right.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Geometric panda and elephant on calves

Geometric · Calf · Black and grey · Photo

Two separate tattoos sit on two calves. The left shows a faceted panda built from angular shapes, with solid black and dotted shading in the segments. The right shows an outlined origami-style elephant in fine black linework with a small dot for the eye, and the image is entirely black and grey against a plain background.

Geometric Fine line Blackwork Calf Panda Elephant Origami Geometric shape Animal

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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 paper-folder on Vauxhall Row had a rule about the last sheet of the night. She never used it for herself. Whatever she made from it would walk out of the shop and find someone who needed it, and she would not be told who.

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One wet March a bus conductor brought in his old pocket diary, its back pages blank. From the first of them she folded a panda, all hard angles and shadowed facets, because his wife had complained that he was forever sitting down. From a page of the wife's recipes she folded an elephant with sharp ears and a trunk held high. She had no more ink for eyes, so she pressed a single dot where one should be and let that serve.

At midnight the two animals went out past the gasworks and the shuttered chapel, over the wet tramlines, to the iron footbridge. The panda settled on the rail and would not be moved. The elephant walked round him three times, the way the women of the street walked round a new baby, and then it sat down beside him as if it had been asked.

At first light the conductor found the panda on his doorstep, folded flat, with a dot of ink on its forehead. The elephant was never seen again, though the paper-folder swore she heard it on the bridge most nights, carrying something heavy and not once complaining about it.