Black and grey realistic tattoo of an elephant walking towards the viewer, with white tusks, on the calf.

Realistic elephant tattoo on a calf

Realism · Calf · Black and grey · Photo

A large elephant is shown head on, walking towards the viewer, with its ears spread and trunk hanging down. The shading is fine and detailed, with soft greys and dark lines defining the wrinkled skin, ivory-toned tusks and the eye. The design fills the length of the lower leg against plain pale skin, with a blurred background.

Realism Calf Elephant Trunk Tusk Wildlife

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the pair of you, and mind the apple wasps. My grandmother told this one about the elephant that walked out of the Harrowgate hills the summer the orchards went heavy. Nobody agreed on how it got so far from the savannah, or from the circus, depending on which tavern you asked. What everyone agreed on was the trunk. It hung low and loose, swinging like a rope that had forgotten what it was for, and it went along the wall of Mrs Pelham's orchard feeling for fallen plums.

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Mrs Pelham was a widow with a crooked back and a sharp tongue, and she had three hundred trees and no patience for beasts. She went out with a broom. The elephant did not run. It simply stood between the rows, ears spread wide as sails, and looked at her with an eye so patient it made her put the broom down. Then it lifted one enormous foot, set it on the dusty path, and waited. She understood, eventually, that it wanted to be shown the way to the water trough behind the cider shed, and that it had been walking since the spring thaw looking for somebody to ask.

She led it there herself. The old story stops at the trough, but my grandmother always added the ending, and I shall too. The next morning every windfall had been picked up and stacked in neat, bruised pyramids along the wall, and the elephant was gone, and the only mark it left was a pair of tusks, ivory bright, lying in the grass where it had shed the fear of being looked at. Mrs Pelham kept them on her windowsill until she died. Mind your feet on the step going out.