Large watercolour-style tattoo across a woman's back showing an elephant with tusks and a woman's face framed by red and pink flowers.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Watercolour elephant and woman across the back

Back · Mixed · Photo

A large tattoo covers most of the upper and middle back, showing an elephant with curved tusks and a stylised female figure with flowing hair set above its head. Dark grey linework sits over loose washes of pink, red, orange, blue and green, with splashes and drips extending outwards. The composition is centred on the spine, and the subject's head is not visible.

Back Elephant Woman Flower Tusk Splashes Watercolour

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

Dear Nell, the elephant came through Tredegar on Tuesday, hauled up Chapel Row on a rope by two men who swore at every cobble, and half the pit town stood on the kerb outside the Co-op to watch it pass. Mr Pryce from the screens said it was the size of the winding house. Its blanket was painted the colours of a bruise going yellow at the edges, and bolted to the top of its skull was a little platform where a woman rode with hair the colour of marmalade, pouring water from a tin jug into the air.

Keep reading

The showman, a thin man called Ambrose Keel, told Mrs Hughes at the chapel gate that the elephant had come off a Liverpool dock company's books and that the woman was his wife. Nobody believed him, because she sang in a language none of us had heard and the elephant kept lifting its trunk towards the spoil heap as though it could smell something under the grass. I stood by the cinder path and watched the water run down the tusks in threads of pink and green, and not one drop reached the road.

Then the trunk came down, very slowly, and the rumble started under the hill, the sort that means the roof is about to say something. The men took their lamps and went down the drift. The elephant went after them, and I did not see it come back up. By morning Ambrose Keel had gone, the platform was empty, and the only mark left on the Co-op wall was a smudge of blue the rain would not shift. Mam says the water on those tusks was the seam coming up to see who was still awake. I have not told her I saw the woman's hair move when the lamps went out. Write soon, and burn this one.