Black and grey realistic tattoo of a front-facing elephant with bamboo stalks behind it, on the outer thigh.

Realistic elephant with bamboo on a thigh

Realism · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A front-facing African elephant with spread ears, long tusks and a textured trunk fills the centre of the design, with bamboo stalks and leaves rising behind it. Fine, layered shading builds up the skin folds, ears and tusks, with soft blended shadows fading into the bare skin at the edges. The design is entirely black and grey and is set against a plain, softly lit background.

Realism Thigh Elephant Tusk Trunk Grass Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The king of Vellamoor had decided the bamboo along the Sefu river was too tall for a man to see over, so he sent three hundred axemen to thin it before the rains.

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The axemen reached the grove at dawn and found the elephant Tamarra standing in the path, her ears spread wide as the palace gates. She did not charge. She simply stood, and each time a man lifted his axe she turned her great grey head toward him until he lowered it again. For three days the grove stood untouched, and the river stayed in its bed.

On the fourth day the king rode out himself, stiff on his white mule, and demanded to know why his road was blocked by an animal. The old reed-weaver Ibeni walked out between the stalks carrying a basket of millet. She told him the bamboo held the soft banks of the Sefu with its roots, and that every stalk cut was a bank that would slide into the water at the next flood. The king looked at the elephant's tusks, pale and curved as the new moon over the water, and said nothing for a long while.

He turned his mule around, and the axemen went home. Years later the children of Vellamoor said Tamarra had never left the grove, only grown greyer and slower, and that if you walked the path at dawn you could find bamboo leaves caught in the folds of her ears, carried there by the wind off the water.