Fine line drawing of an ornate elephant head with feathers, a circular medallion, flowers and dotted chains, shown as a tattoo design without a body part visible.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornate elephant head with feathers line design

Fine line · Black and grey · Flash

A black line drawing of an elephant's head wearing a headdress of plumed feathers, with a circular medallion marked with a small monogram on its forehead. Flowers and leaves frame the trunk and sides of the head, and strings of dots hang beneath it. The design uses fine, even linework and dotted accents on a plain cream background, with no shading or colour.

Fine line Dotwork Elephant Feather Medallion Flower Leaves Dotted chain Headdress

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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

In the last winter of the Halford Brothers' Travelling Menagerie, the old elephant was called Mabel, though the posters had stopped using her name years before. She stood in a wet field outside Thetford with a crown of grey ostrich plumes strapped to her brow. A village girl called Essie Marsh had sewn them on for a loaf a week, and she had been paid in bread for a month now, which was how things went with the Halfords by then.

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The tents had gone one by one, sold to a farmer, a chapel and a man from Ipswich who wanted the canvas for a boat. Each night the ringmaster, Obadiah Crane, counted the coppers on an upturned crate by the lamp, and each night the total was smaller. The brass medallion on Mabel's forehead had been his father's gift to her, with two letters cut into its face to bring luck. Crane said it was worth more than the whole wagon. He said that often, and nobody believed him.

One night in March the gate was found open and the field empty except for the crate and a trail of small dots pressed into the mud, like beads come loose from a string. Essie went after it with the lamp. The drove road ran east toward the marshes, and the trail went on, faint then clear, for three miles.

Her grandmother always said that at the sea wall Mabel stopped and lifted her trunk to the wind as if testing it for salt. Then she knelt, which elephants are not meant to do, and let the girl lift the plumes from her head. Nobody saw the animal go into the water, but in the morning the medallion lay on the shingle, shining, with the letters turned up to the sky.