Small black fine line tattoo of an elephant with swirling ornamental patterns on its body, placed on the ankle above a black strap sandal.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornamental elephant on an ankle

Fine line · Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

A small elephant facing right, with its trunk raised, is outlined in thin black line. Its body is filled with curling decorative swirls, and the tattoo sits on the side of an ankle above a black strap. The image is in black ink only, with a plain light background and a shallow focus on the skin.

Fine line Ankle Elephant Swirl Ornament Trunk

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

Nobody else noticed the elephant on the back of the old register page, but Ruth Calloway did. She had found the yellowed sheet pinned to the corkboard beside the sports hall doors, Year Nine, Form 9C, with her own name at the bottom in Mr Pryce's neat capitals. Beside it, in the margin, someone had drawn a small elephant facing right, its trunk raised in what might have been a trumpet or a wave.

Keep reading

Dev Mallin had drawn it. She knew because he had spent every Thursday in the back row covering his exercise books with curling ornaments copied from a rug catalogue his mother kept under the stairs. The elephant was always the same: a plain outline, then a body filled with spirals that looked like wind through sand. He had told her once that elephants never forget, and she had told him that was rubbish, because she had already forgotten his surname twice that term.

At the buffet, a man with grey at his temples was telling a story about a coach trip to the zoo. Ruth waited until he finished and asked whether anyone had seen Dev. Nobody had. The caretaker, Mr Lusk, who had come back to help with the urn, said the family had moved to Leeds the summer after GCSEs. He nodded at the corkboard and said Dev's sketchbooks were still in the bottom drawer of the art room, if anyone wanted them.

Ruth went to look. The drawer held a stack of exercise books with covers as soft as cloth, and on the top one, in pencil, was the elephant again, a little larger now, its trunk lifted high enough to reach the edge of the page. Underneath, in Dev's cramped hand, was a single line she had never noticed before. She read it twice, closed the drawer gently, and went to find her coat, because the last bus to Leeds left at six.