Black silhouette tattoo of three elephants walking in a row around an ankle, with bare feet and rolled denim visible on wet sand.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Three elephants on an ankle

Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

A bare ankle shows a row of three solid black elephant silhouettes, each smaller than the last, with trunks raised and walking in the same direction. The tattoo is inked in flat black with no visible shading or fine detail. The photograph is taken at foot level on a wet, sandy surface, with two other pairs of feet and rolled jeans in the frame.

Ankle Elephant Silhouette 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 salt pan had cracked into grey plates by the time the matriarch decided the herd would not stop again before the river. Behind her walked her daughter, heavy with the season's last calf, and behind her daughter came the youngest, a bull calf barely taller than a fence post, who kept halting to stare at the heat shimmering off the flats as though it were water he could drink if he only waited long enough.

Keep reading

The old cow did not turn around. She had walked this pan for forty years and knew that calves who stopped to look got left behind, and that the vultures on the dead acacia were patient. But the youngest had a habit of trumpeting when he was frightened, a thin sound that carried for miles, so each time he fell behind, his mother's trunk swung back once, lightly, touching his spine, and the line closed up again. Dust rose behind them in a long ribbon, and nothing else moved in any direction.

By the third evening the calf's legs were grey to the knee and his ears hung limp at his jaw. The river was a dark line of reeds ahead, close enough now to smell. The matriarch slowed, then stopped, and the others stopped with her. She lifted her trunk toward the water and held it there, and the youngest came up alongside her and lifted his own, small and exact, with the same curl at the tip.

Nobody had to tell him where the water was. They walked down the bank together, the largest first and the smallest last, and from the far side of the reeds they looked like one animal drawn three times, each copy a little less certain than the one before it.