Black line-work tattoo of an elephant on the upper arm, with a small red heart on its body.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Line-work elephant on upper arm

Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A large elephant is tattooed on the outer upper arm, shown in profile with its trunk curling down at the left. The body is built from dense, flowing contour lines and hatching in black ink, with light grey areas left between them. A small red heart sits on the elephant's flank, the only colour in the design.

Upper arm Elephant Heart Tusk Trunk

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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

No, sit closer, the customs man is still behind his newspaper and he has never once looked up when a story was being told. Where was I? The elephant. He came up the valley road at dusk with the snow already on the pass, and the guard at the wire stood so fast his chair went over. Nobody had seen an elephant walk a frontier since the old king's time, and nobody had thought to write a rule for one.

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He carried nothing but a folded paper held up in his trunk like a ticket. The guard, Tomas Veselka, read it twice by the lamp. It said only: one heart, carried over the line, to be returned to the woman who lost it on the far side of the water. The lines all through the paper were as fine as the grain in pine, Tomas said, so you could not tell where the writing stopped and the animal began. The trunk curled down beside the gate like a question mark that had given up waiting for an answer.

The officer wanted it declared. Tomas said the elephant had nothing to declare, and the officer said everything had to be declared, and the elephant turned his grey head slowly, the way a man turns to look at a clock he already knows is wrong. On his flank, where the hatching gathered thickest, sat a small red heart, the only warm colour in all that grey. The officer leaned in to see it. The heart was still warm to the touch, Tomas swore, and it made the officer go quiet and wave them both through.

So the elephant went over the line, long legs stepping into the pines, and by morning the pass was white again. But Tomas kept the folded paper in his breast pocket until he died, and the wall of that customs house still carries a faint red smudge on the lintel, just above where a woman once pressed her palm to wait for him. Now drink your coffee, mind the step, and don't you dare tell the officer.