Black and grey ornamental elephant tattoo with dense dotwork patterns on the upper thigh of a person in denim shorts.

Ornate elephant tattoo on a thigh

Dotwork · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A large elephant walks towards the viewer, with its head, tusks, ears and legs filled with dense ornamental patterns. Fine black linework and stippled dotwork shading build texture and depth across the skin. The tattoo fills most of the thigh and is set against a warm yellow backdrop, with a hand and ring visible at the left.

Dotwork Geometric Thigh Elephant Tusk Ornamental pattern

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 lift in Carrick House has been broken since March, so you take the stairs with the shopping bag cutting into your fingers, counting landings the way Ruth taught you. Ruth is the caretaker. She keeps a tin of fine-nibbed pens in the cupboard under the bin chute and draws on anything that holds still: the backs of council letters, the lids of paint tins, the damp patch above the fourth floor radiator.

Keep reading

The elephant started there in February. Ruth said it was walking towards the bins because it had heard they were full of peanuts. Each night it grew. Its ears became rings of tiny fish scales, its trunk coiled into rows of dots, and its tusks curled out past the edge of the paper as though someone had given up on keeping it in the frame.

On Thursday the council sent a man with a roller. You watched from the landing as he painted over the damp patch and the paper beside it, and when he had gone, the elephant was still there, pressed under the new cream like a thumbprint under glass. Ruth said nothing. She only took a fresh sheet from her cardigan pocket and smoothed it on the bannister.

That evening you found a drawing taped to your door. The elephant faced you now, one foot lifted as if it had just stepped out of the stairwell and was waiting to be let in. In the corner, in Ruth's tight capitals, it said: KEEP THE LIFT KEY. ASK ME WHERE IT GOES.