Fine line black outline tattoo of a small elephant on the inner wrist, photographed with the hand raised against a pale sky.

Small elephant outline on a wrist

Fine line · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A small elephant facing left is drawn in a single black outline on the inside of a wrist. The linework is thin and even, with no shading, and the body is left unfilled. The hand is raised against a pale blue sky, with painted nails and a gold ring visible in the frame.

Fine line Other Elephant Animal

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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

Now sit close, because my chest is not what it was and I'll not say it twice. You'll have heard of Cwm Dafydd, where the pit wheel stood above the chapel like a bad-tempered saint. Nobody there had ever seen an elephant. The travelling fair came once a year to the field by the chapel, with a man who sold brandy in tin cups and a painted wagon, and that was the nearest thing to the wider world we got.

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The winter the roof fell in at number four level, they sent down the old pony, Cadogan, to haul the tubs, and when the pony was lost to the gas they sent down a boy instead. Idris Hopkin was twelve, and he had drawn on the back of every slate in his mother's kitchen. That winter he copied an elephant from a page of a stolen almanac, and he drew it so thin you could barely see it on the paper. Each night he took his candle to the wall of the cutting and drew the same beast in soot, facing left, toward the shaft. He said a creature that faces the way you're going will carry you there.

In March the water came, and the men sang hymns in the dark while the pumps coughed. Idris said nothing. He only tapped the wall with his lamp, and the wall answered with a hollow note. They dug where the drawing pointed and broke into an older tunnel, dry as bread, and out they walked through the far side of the hill into a field of rain and nettles, the whole shift of them, forty-one men and one boy.

The almanac is still in the drawer of my dresser, the page soft as cloth where the elephant was. Idris never drew a second one. He said one was plenty to make a road, and that a road is only a line someone was brave enough to walk.