Fine line black outline tattoo of a small elephant on the side of a person's ribs, below a white top.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small elephant outline on the ribs

Fine line · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A small elephant facing left is drawn in a single black outline with no shading, sitting on the side of a person's ribcage. The linework is thin and even, and the ink is solid black with no colour. The skin is shown in a close crop, with a white top pulled up above the tattoo and a blurred framed picture in the background.

Fine line Ribs Elephant Outline Animal

Find an artist for this

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 pen never left the paper, and that was the whole trick of it. Nell Ashdown drew the elephant in one unbroken pass at the back of the cold-storage yard, under a sodium lamp that buzzed like a moth in a jar, while the night foreman counted tins of peaches and swore at a forklift that would not start. Her teacher had told her an elephant could not be drawn without lifting the pen. At nineteen, she had decided that was a matter of opinion.

Keep reading

Harold Pike watched over her shoulder with his cap pushed back. His daughter Ruth was in the children's ward on Marsh Lane, he said, and had asked for an elephant that could walk away from trouble. Nell didn't argue. She drew the trunk low, the ear a single loop, the legs short and certain, and she set the animal facing left, towards the canal where the lorries idled with their lights off. Harold said it looked like it was heading home. Nell said elephants always knew the way to water, and they never forgot a road they had walked once.

At dawn Harold drove to the hospital with the sheet folded in his jacket pocket. Ruth was awake, propped against two pillows, and she unfolded the paper on her blanket with fingers that were still sticky from breakfast. She traced the outline without speaking. Then she asked her father to pin it above the bed, facing the window, so the elephant could see the morning coming up over the car park.

Nell never went back to the yard. The forklift was fixed by the following week, and the pallets moved on as they always did. But Harold kept a tin of peaches on his dashboard for luck, and sometimes, on the long drive past the canal, he swore the little grey shape on the sheet was still walking, one steady line, towards the light.