Black line drawing of an elephant head covered in ornamental swirls, two roses and a heart with a diamond, shown as a tattoo design rather than on skin.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornamental elephant head design

Black and grey · Flash

A symmetrical front view of an elephant head drawn in black linework on a white background. The forehead holds a heart containing a diamond shape, flanked by two roses on the ears and filled with scrolling floral ornament across the face and trunk. The ink is solid black with no shading or greys, and the composition is centred and evenly balanced.

Elephant Rose Heart Diamond Ornament Swirl Floral

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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

Sit down, sit down, and mind the gull, he's been eyeing your chips since you came in. You want the elephant? Everyone wants the elephant. She came up the Tallow Steps in the spring of the great wet year, on the back of a flat cart, with a man called Hesketh walking alongside holding a bucket of pomegranate juice like it was holy water. Nobody in Porthgarrow had ever seen an elephant. They had seen a heron standing on one leg for an hour, which they thought was the same thing.

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The beast was called Mabel, bought off a travelling fair that went bust in Bristol. Her ears were grey as wet slate and nobody had told her they were meant to be ugly. So Ruth Anning, the lacemaker from Fore Street, who had lost her husband to the herring and her daughter to Plymouth, climbed the cart one evening with a pot of black ink and a fine brush. She painted roses on those ears, big ones, the kind that grow over cottage doors, then drew curls and leaves across the great forehead until the old girl looked like a church gate in June.

Mabel stood for it. Elephants remember who is kind to them, Hesketh always said, and I believed him right up until he sold her to a farmer in Lostwithiel for four pounds and a sack of barley. The farmer couldn't feed her, so she walked back. Twelve miles. Took her three days. Ruth met her at the top of the hill with a heart she had cut from tin and hung on a cord round the trunk, a diamond scratched in the middle so the sun caught every side.

That's why the north gate of the harbour has never rusted. Mabel walks the wall still, they say, when the tide is out, and if you hear something heavy and patient coming down the slipway after dark, you leave the gate open and you say her name.