Coloured drawing of an ornate elephant head with a jewelled headdress, hanging chains and curved tusks, in neo-traditional style flash.

Ornate elephant head design

Neo-trad · Colour · Flash

A coloured pencil drawing of an elephant's head, front on, with large ears, curved tusks and a trunk pointing down. The forehead carries a purple jewel, green leaves with blue eyes, and layered purple plumes, with strings of beads and chains draped across the ears and tusks. Bold black outlines frame the design, and pink, purple, green and grey tones are used throughout on a sheet of tracing paper clipped to a wicker surface.

Neo-trad Elephant Jewel Chain Bead Tusk Leaves Eye Plume

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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

You find the drawing folded inside a tea caddy at the back of Mehta's Pawn on Lower Chalk Street, a little after eleven, when the shutter is half down and the rain has turned the pavement to black glass. The pawnbroker says a girl left it years ago as surety for a bus fare she never came back to pay. On tracing paper, in coloured pencil, an elephant stares out at you with a purple jewel set in its brow and three eyes hidden in a crown of green leaves. Chains hang from its ears like tram wires strung between two streetlamps.

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You carry it through the empty streets to the all-night print shop by the ring road, where the owner, a man with a cigarette behind his ear, lays it on the glass of his copier and tells you the trunk is the wrong way round. Elephants do not point their trunks at the ground unless they are hunting for something they have dropped. You say it is only a drawing. He shrugs and feeds the sheet through, and the machine hums as though it has been waiting all night to be asked.

By the bus depot the sky is going the colour of weak tea. You sit on the kerb and hold the copy against the light, tracing the beads with your thumb, counting the chains that drop past the tusks until you lose the number. The purple plumes catch the first grey light coming off the canal, and for a moment the elephant seems to lift its head, as if it has finally found the thing it was looking for on the pavement, which was not a jewel or a fare but the road home.