Small black fine-line tattoo of a geometric origami elephant on the side of a person's torso, shown in black and white.

Origami elephant on the side of the ribs

Fine line · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A small outline tattoo of an elephant folded from paper, drawn with angular facets and clean single-weight linework. It is in black ink with no shading or fill, and sits alone on the side of the torso against plain skin. The black and white photograph is taken close up, with the striped fabric and dark clothing in the background.

Fine line Geometric Ribs Elephant Origami Outline

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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

Nell had folded the third elephant before the lorry driver finished his tea, and by the time the tent poles came down she had seven of them lined up along the caravan step, each one a little sharper than the last. Paper did not need feeding or watering or a patch of wet field outside Swindon. It only needed a steady hand and a bit of patience, and those were two things the circus had in short supply by October.

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Her grandfather Joss still wore the red coat, though it had gone thin at the elbows, and he sold tickets now from a folding stool by the gate. Dora, the last real elephant, had gone to a farm in Kent in the spring, and the bills had not been changed since. Nell took the paper animals to the gate instead. A penny each, she said, and a penny was about what most people had left after the fair.

The boy who bought the seventh one was about nine, with mud on his knees and a programme he had folded into a hat. He turned the elephant over twice and asked why its ears were so flat. Nell said paper never knew how big it was supposed to be, so it only got the shape of things. Joss, from his stool, laughed so hard he had to sit down properly for once.

That night, after the last show nobody came to, Nell pinned the seven elephants to the inside of the big top, where the canvas still caught the light from the lamps. They looked less like a circus than a herd somebody had decided to keep. In the morning the boy's mother came back for an eighth, and Nell, with nothing left in the paper drawer, folded one from the back of an old poster.