Black and grey ornamental elephant tattoo with dense dotwork patterns on the outer thigh, worn by a person in denim shorts.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornate elephant tattoo on thigh

Dotwork · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A large elephant facing the camera fills most of the upper thigh, with its ears, head and body covered in intricate repeating patterns. The design is built from fine lines and stippled dots, with shading giving the trunk and legs depth. The image is in black and grey ink against warm yellow fabric, and the wearer's denim shorts and knitted top are visible above the tattoo.

Dotwork Thigh Elephant Ornamental pattern Mandala Tusk

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

Before the bakers' bells, when the ovens in Carrow Lane were only just warming and the flour dust hung like breath in the cold, old Mrs Pelham would come down to the back step with a stool and tell us the elephant story, and we would stop kneading to listen. Every loaf in the street, she said, has a patience baked into its crust, and the elephant was the one who taught it. He came over the hills from a country no one on our street had visited, carrying a sack of spices on his back and a pattern on his skin so fine that every line was a road somebody had walked.

Keep reading

He was not a fierce beast, she told us, only a very tired one. Every dawn he wandered the market lanes looking for a baker who would let him sit by the hearth, and every dawn the bakers shooed him off with their brooms. Except old Tomas Fenn, who had a bad knee and a worse temper, and who one winter morning pushed a warm bun across the sill with two fingers, the way you feed a pigeon you don't quite like. The elephant ate it slowly, lowering his great head so carefully that the crumbs settled without a single one landing on the cobbles.

That was the bargain, Mrs Pelham always said, pulling her shawl tight. The elephant never asked for more than the warmth and one bun a day, and in return he stood in the doorway each morning and counted the rising loaves with his trunk, so none of them could sneak off before they were ready. Tomas went on to be the finest baker in the county. When they buried him, the elephant walked behind the cart with his head bowed, and nobody in Carrow Lane has baked a careless loaf since.