Fine line black outline tattoo of a small elephant with its trunk raised, on the side of a torso below a red top.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small elephant outline on the side ribs

Fine line · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A small elephant is drawn as a single thin black outline with its trunk curled upwards. The line is clean and even, and the tattoo sits alone on smooth, tanned skin. The photo is taken close up, with a red top at the left and edge of the frame.

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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

Mind the rope, it's older than your mother, and sit where the gulls can't reach your chips. Right. You want the elephant, not the lighthouse. Everybody wants the lighthouse.

Keep reading

There was a woman called Mercy Tolland who kept a chandlery on Pennant Quay, and she drew with one pencil line and never once lifted it from the paper. Her husband Denis sailed the Brisk out past the breakwater for thirty years. When he took the boat out one March, she sketched an elephant on the back of a chandler's bill, a small grey thing with its trunk curled up like a question. She pinned it in the window so the men on the wall could see it from the water, and each night she traced it again with a lamp behind the glass so the line never faded.

Then the fog came in thick as porridge, and nine boats were still out. The lamp was nothing in that. The bill had gone soft from the damp and the line had run into a grey smudge. Mercy pressed her finger to the cold glass and followed the curl of that trunk, over and over, and the men out there learned to steer by the bend of it. The Brisk came in last, low in the water, its engine coughing, and Denis stepped off onto the quay with his hat in his hands and asked what on earth she had been doing to the window.

That's why the elephant has no tail, you see. She ran out of paper, and she never did finish it.

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