Fine line black outline of a small elephant with its trunk raised, tattooed on the side of a torso at the ribs.

Small elephant outline on the ribs

Fine line · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A small elephant is drawn in a single thin black outline with its trunk curled upwards. The tattoo sits on the side of the ribcage, with a lifted white top and bare skin around it. The image is a casual phone photograph with the tattoo small in the lower right of the frame.

Fine line Ribs Elephant Animal Outline

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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 Bramleys dropped early that year, and by the last week of August the grass under Fenwick's trees was soft with them. You are fourteen and paid by the sack, so you work the rows before the wasps wake. Your brother Teddy swears the old ladder in the far corner is haunted by the circus that wintered here before the war, and you tell him haunted things don't climb.

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On Thursday you find the elephant. It isn't a real one. It's a rusted sign the size of a door, dragged into the hedge row, its outline painted in black enamel that has crazed to grey. The trunk curls up over the top rail. You pick a windfall from the grass and hold it up to the sign the way you'd feed a horse, and the apple's shadow lands exactly in the curl.

Mr Fenwick comes down the row in his waistcoat and says he's been meaning to take that thing to the tip for twenty years. You ask whether he'd sell it. He laughs and asks what anyone would want with a picture of an animal that has been gone since your grandmother was a girl. You say you would. He says fine, take it, and you spend the afternoon wheeling it out on a borrowed barrow, stopping every twenty yards to wipe your hands on your skirt.

At dusk you prop it against the gate of your mother's back garden, where the trunk points at the kitchen window. Teddy asks what it's for. You tell him it's for holding up the things nobody else can reach, and he goes in without asking again. The trunk stays raised all night, holding its curl as if it is waiting for the last apple of the year to drop.