Black and grey tattoo of a decorated elephant with its trunk raised, in a traditional style, on a person's upper back near the shoulder blade.

Ornate elephant on upper back

Traditional · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A small elephant walks to the right with its trunk raised, covered in dotted scrolls, looped lines and patterned panels on its body, saddle and legs. The bold outlines are filled with black and grey shading, with a soft gradient on the back and the trunk. The tattoo sits centrally on bare skin against a plain, softly lit background, with a small part of the subject's hair visible at the top of the frame.

Traditional Back Elephant Ornamental pattern Dot Scroll Trunk

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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 lorry coughs twice in the yard before dawn, and you stand in the frost with the gate chain looped round your wrist, watching your father fight the ramp. The cattle are sold and the barn is promised to a man from Boston who wants it for flats, so there is nothing left on the farm to carry except the thing wrapped in feed sacking on the passenger seat. He says you can't take it. You say it was hers. He says that's exactly why.

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You unwrap it on the kitchen table while the kettle ticks. The elephant is no longer than your forearm, carved from sycamore at a fair in Skegness the summer before you were born, and your mother spent three winters painting it at this same table with enamels bought from the ironmonger in Spilsby. Dots run down its back in neat rows, scrolls curl round its legs, and each panel on the saddle holds a small pattern she copied from a tea caddy. The trunk is lifted as if it means to trumpet at someone coming up the lane. The black has worn pale at the knees where you used to pick at it with your thumbnail when you were meant to be doing homework.

Your father comes in stamping snow from his boots, sees it, and says nothing for a long time. Then he takes the tea caddy down from the shelf and sets it beside the elephant with the lid open, the same patterns printed in faded blue on the tin. Neither of you says what that means. You wrap the elephant back in its sacking, carry it out past the empty stalls, and wedge it on the seat beside you, facing forward, trunk raised toward the road.