Pink cartoon elephant tattoo with blue and green watercolour splashes on the forearm, outlined in black.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pink elephant with watercolour splashes on forearm

Forearm · Colour · Photo

A small pink cartoon elephant sits with its trunk raised, outlined in black linework. Soft blue, green and pink watercolour-style washes spread behind the figure. The colourful tattoo sits on a pale forearm against a red damask-patterned wall.

Forearm Elephant Cartoon Watercolour splash Animal Pink

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

Sit down, the lot of you, and mind the dust on the bench, it has been there since my grandmother's grandmother sat on it. Out past the salt flats, where the tarmac gives up and becomes a line of stones, there lived a pink elephant who could not stop painting. Nobody taught him. He found a tin of colours left behind by a tinker who died of thirst at the wells, and he carried it up into the hills with his trunk.

Keep reading

He painted what the desert had forgotten. Blue for the rain that came once in seven years, green for the thorn bush that woke after it, pink for the evenings when the rocks turned the colour of a lamp. The lorry drivers grumbled, because every time they passed they found a fresh splash across the road sign, and the sign said only "Fuel, 40 miles", which nobody believed anyway.

One autumn a girl called Halima walked out from the mission with a goat and a bad temper, and she found him sitting in the shade of a mesquite, trunk raised, waiting for someone to ask what he was about. "Painting the sky," he said, "but it keeps running off the edges." She tied the goat to his tail, which he allowed, and climbed the nearest rock. From up there she could see the whole dry country, and everywhere his colours had landed, the sand was already greening at the edges.

So when you see a smear of green on the road, don't scrub it off. The drivers still stop at that mesquite and lean on their horns for the pink one, who never answers, but who every morning has painted something new.