Fine line black outline tattoo of a small elephant with a tiny heart above its trunk, on the side of an ankle.

Small elephant and heart on an ankle

Fine line · Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

A small outline tattoo of a cartoon-style elephant faces right, with a tiny heart floating above its raised trunk. The linework is thin and even, and the design is filled with no shading. The ink is black against lightly tanned skin, and the design sits low on the ankle in a casual phone photo.

Fine line Ankle Elephant Heart

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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 Fenwick Travelling Menagerie pitched on the cricket field at Hatherby the week the gasworks flooded, and by Tuesday every child on Mill Lane had decided the small grey elephant was theirs. Mine was Dolly, though I was only allowed to feed her a carrot through the rope. Her keeper, a thin man called Albie Crane with tobacco stains on his cuffs, let me hold the bucket because my father had mended the brake on the elephant's trailer for nothing.

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On the last Saturday Albie told me the show was moving on to Wisbech in the morning. I said nothing that would have made him feel bad about it. I went home and sat at the kitchen table with a pencil and the back of a Co-op bread wrapper, and I drew her in one line that never lifted off the paper. Her trunk curled up as though she were sniffing at something just out of reach. I gave her a heart because Albie had said elephants never forget anyone who is kind to them, and I wanted her to know who had been kind.

On Sunday the field was only flattened grass and the smell of hay. Albie's tin was on our gatepost, wedged between the bricks, with the lid pressed down hard. Inside was my drawing, folded in four and gone soft at the creases, and beneath it a square of card on which he had copied the picture in ink, neat as a schoolmaster. The heart was there, and the trunk, and the little legs planted square. Under it he had written in capitals, DOLLY SAYS TA.

I kept that tin on my windowsill for years, long after the field was built over with bungalows. Most mornings the sun came through the glass and lit the heart before it lit anything else.