Black ink design of an elephant head formed into a heart shape, filled with dense ornamental patterns on a plain off-white background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornate elephant head in a heart shape

Black and grey · Flash

A symmetrical elephant head is arranged so that its two ears form the lobes of a heart. The head is filled with dense black linework and ornamental patterns, including dots, bands and scroll-like motifs. The design is shown in black on a plain pale grey background, centred in the frame.

Elephant Heart Ornamental pattern Animal

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

Dad never trusted a boat without something watching over the bow, so when a scrapyard in Brentford sold him a wooden elephant head off a fairground ride, he paid for it with two weeks of coal money and screwed it to the cabin roof anyway. Mum said it looked like a hat stand that had given up. The paint was flaking, the trunk had been snapped and glued, and every inch was covered in dots and bands and scrolled ferns that Dad spent a whole winter picking out with a sign-writer's brush.

Keep reading

We worked the Grand Union for eleven years with that elephant watching the locks. The keepers at Hatton called it the Duke, and kids on the towpath waved at it as if it might wave back. Nobody saw the other thing until the afternoon Mum stood on the bank at Braunston with her hand shading her eyes and shouted for me to look. From the water, with the sun behind, the two great ears fell into the shape of a heart, and the head sat neatly in its point. She laughed so hard she had to sit down on the gunwale.

Dad died the winter after. I took the tiller alone in March, and at the first lock I looked up and the heart was there again, grey against a sky the colour of wet slate. I did not cry. I bought a tin of black gloss from the chandlery in Napton and spent three evenings going over the dots on the trunk, one at a time, so the pattern stayed sharp.

When I sold the boat I left the elephant bolted to the roof. The new owners wrote to say a girl on the bank had told them it was a heart with a face in it, and they had decided not to change the name.