Two matching black ink elephant tattoos with floral and paisley patterns sit on the inner forearms of two people, one on each wrist.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Matching patterned elephant tattoos on two forearms

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Two near-identical elephants are tattooed side by side on the inner wrists of two arms, each facing right with its trunk curled. The bodies are filled with floral motifs, paisley-style swirls and dotted detail, outlined in solid black lines. The ink is a dark blue-black with no colour, and the two designs are arranged symmetrically against smooth skin and a blurred dark background.

Forearm Elephant Floral Paisley Mandala Pattern Matching

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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 carved block had been Aunt Ruth's before it was mine, a slab of sycamore worn smooth at the corners where forty years of thumbs had lifted it from the ink tray. On its face sat an elephant with its trunk curled up like a question, its body crowded with paisley swirls and tiny dotted flowers I had cut so fine the gouge kept skidding. Nobody in the Leicester print room expected me to finish the whole animal in one season, least of all me.

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Ruth taught me to pull a test sheet before every run and to check the register by holding the paper up to the window. That June we had an order for two hundred yards of indigo cotton for a hotel in Brighton, and the client wanted the elephant twice, side by side, both walking the same way like they were heading for the same water. I said we would need a second block. Ruth said we would need a second elephant, and that I should stop grumbling and ink the first one.

We ran the cloth through the press all week. Ruth never once let me print the second elephant from a fresh carving. She just reinked the old block, set it down, lifted it, and set it down again a hand's width along, until the pair sat on the bolt like a couple of old friends who had never needed to be introduced.

By Friday the bolts were folded in tissue paper in the packing crate, and I stood over them with my sleeves rolled up and ink to the elbow. Ruth came to look over my shoulder. I asked her which of the two was the first print. She tapped the crate lid twice and said she had stopped being able to tell years ago.