Black ink line drawing of a front-facing elephant filled with dense paisley and mandala patterns, a design suited to a fine line tattoo.

Ornate elephant line drawing

Fine line · Black and grey · Flash

A front-facing elephant is drawn in black ink on pale paper, with its ears, tusks, trunk and legs outlined in bold strokes. The head and body are filled with intricate paisley, mandala and geometric motifs, dotted lines and small scrolls. The image is entirely black and white and is centred on a plain background.

Fine line Elephant Mandala Paisley Ornament Pattern Tusk Trunk Ear Leg Scroll Dot

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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

The elephant came aboard at Surat and would not eat. By the fortieth day out of Bombay the crew had stopped arguing about whether to throw it over and started arguing about who would do it. Only Hannah Teague, the ship's clerk's daughter, sat with it in the hold each evening with a pot of iron-gall ink and a goose quill.

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She began on its forehead with a small ring of petals, then ran lines down the face like rivers on a chart. The animal stopped swaying. Past the Cape it stood quiet while she worked on its legs, and it took bran mash from her palm. Sailors came down to watch, and each man asked for something: a compass rose on his shoulder, a sun on the ear. She never refused anyone, though she grew thin on the work.

Off St Helena the sea went flat and grey for six days. The mate said the spirals on the trunk were a curse, and Hannah said they were only a pattern, one loop after another, the kind that never has to stop. He told her to finish or leave it. She finished the last scroll on the left tusk at dawn, and the wind came up the same hour.

At the Thames the elephant walked down the gangplank into the fog, and the dockmen stopped to stare at it. Hannah stayed aboard and folded the empty ink pot into her coat. In the ship's log, beside the day of landing, she had made a column of small dots down the margin, one for every morning the beast had eaten from her hand.