Fine line tattoo of three elephants walking in a row on the forearm, in black ink on pale skin.

Three elephants walking in a line

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows three elephants in a line, from a large adult on the left to a smaller calf on the right, with the middle elephant's trunk reaching towards the calf. The design uses thin, even black outlines with no shading or fill, so the animals are shown only as simple contours. The photograph has a warm, sepia-toned cast, and the design sits centrally on the forearm against a plain background.

Fine line Forearm Elephant Calf Line art 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 lorry will not take all three of them, so the ringmaster says they will walk to the farm at Hollin Moor, and it falls to you to lead them. Mags goes first without being asked. She has walked this road for forty years and knows which verges are soft and which lay-bys have a tap that still runs cold. You hold the rope loosely, the way you were taught, and feel the weight of the morning come up through your boots. Behind the caravans the big top is already down in heaps of canvas, the stripes lying flat in the wet grass.

Keep reading

Nell walks in the middle, and the calf, Pip, keeps to her right side, close enough that her shoulder brushes Nell's leg at every step. Pip was born in October, when the crowds still came in their coats and paid for the sawdust and the brass band. Now the bandwagon is sold and the lights are switched off, and the calf keeps stopping to look back at the empty field. Each time, Nell reaches round with her trunk and lays it across the small back, the way you might steady a child on a crowded platform, and each time Pip goes on.

At the cattle grid outside the village the calf plants all four feet and will not cross. A woman at the bus shelter shouts something about the council. You have nothing to offer but a paper bag of carrots gone soft in the damp, so you sit on the low wall and wait, and the three of them stand in the lane like a row of posts. Mags turns her great head and looks at you for a long moment. Then she walks back, slowly, and stands over the grid where the calf can see her legs.

It is Nell who finally moves. She lifts her trunk and curls it over Pip's back, and the calf steps forward into the shade of that grey arch as though it were a doorway. You get up off the wall. The line closes again, Mags in front, Nell in the middle, Pip tucked in at the end, and the road runs on ahead of them under a sky that has started to rain.