Black line drawing of a giraffe whose neck and body are formed from the flowing script word Stalld, in a fine line style, shown as a design on a white background.

Giraffe drawn with script lettering

Fine line · Black and grey · Flash

A single-line drawing of a giraffe with its head turned to the right and small ossicones on its head. The neck and body are built from joined cursive lettering that reads as a word, and the legs are drawn as thin, open strokes. The image is plain black linework on white with no shading or colour.

Fine line Lettering Giraffe Script Lettering 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

Now mind, I'll tell it the way my grandmother told it to me, and you'll keep your hands out of the lamp oil while I do.

Keep reading

Ezra Pellow painted the boat names on the fish quay at Scarrow Haven for forty years, and that spring the letters started walking off his signboards. Every morning another word came up short. The chandler lost the R from CHANDLERY, the fishmonger's gold S went missing, and the widow Harrow woke to find her husband's name gone from the stern of the Patience, leaving only a clean pale shadow where it had been.

On the ninth night Ezra took his lantern down to the mud and found a beast standing in the shallows. It had a neck like a mainmast, legs folded like a heron's, and two small horns that looked like twists of paper. It was chewing a loose S off the fishmonger's board, and when it saw the light it lowered its long face and looked at him with eyes like wet pebbles, unhurried, as if he were the one out of place.

Ezra had no rope that would reach its neck, so he did the only thing he knew. He took out his brush, wrote the word the sea had been trying to say all spring, STALLED, in long looping script down the harbour wall, and held it up to the beast. It leaned in to read. The letters came loose one by one and wound themselves into its neck and body, until the beast stood on the quay as a thing made entirely of writing, and could not move at all.

The boats were stuck in the harbour that summer, for the beast would not go and the tide would not turn without its word. My grandmother always said you can still see it there, if you come at dawn, standing in the shallows with its head turned towards the sea, reading the names of the boats aloud to the water.