Black and grey ornamental elephant tattoo on the outer thigh, with denim shorts above and a hand wearing a ring at the left edge.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornate elephant on the thigh

Dotwork · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A large elephant walks towards the viewer, its head, tusks, trunk and legs filled with intricate patterns of dots, lines and scrolls. The shading is built from dense stippled dots and fine hatching, in black and grey ink, with the darkest areas on the trunk and ears. The elephant fills most of the frame on the upper thigh, with a hand and a yellow wall at the left edge and frayed denim shorts at the top.

Dotwork Thigh Elephant Ornament Pattern Tusk 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

The elephant came out of the dry lake the morning the last well in Harrow Wells turned green with salt. Nobody had seen one so large. Its ears were dark as wet slate and its trunk hung low, and every inch of it was covered in small marks, dots packed so close they read like sand grains, and curling lines that looped back on themselves like rope left to coil.

Keep reading

Old Mother Sefa, who kept the ink-house by the north gate, said the marks were a map. She had learned her letters from the walls of the dead city, where the same patterns ran up the pillars. Each dot, she said, was a place where water had once been. The scrolls were the roads between them. The children laughed, and then they stopped laughing when the elephant lowered its head and walked, unhurried, straight past the gate and out towards the dry bed where nothing had grown in forty years.

The town followed, carrying sacks and a donkey with a cracked bell. Sefa walked at the back with a lamp, reading the marks along the great shoulder and down the legs. At every scroll the elephant paused, and at every pause she found a dot she had missed before. By noon they were digging in the grey clay beneath the place where its left foreleg had rested.

The water came up cold and brown, then clear. The elephant turned, walked back to the lake, and lay down in the shade of a broken tower. Sefa said it was not a gift. It had only remembered the way. That evening she pressed a small dot of ink onto the back of her own wrist, and when the children asked why, she told them a map is only good if somebody keeps walking it.