Watercolour-style elephant tattoo with loose black linework and rainbow washes of pink, blue, green and orange on a limb.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Watercolour elephant tattoo on a limb

Other · Colour · Photo

A sketchy elephant walks across the skin, drawn with loose black linework that runs past the edges of the coloured areas. The body is filled with soft blended washes of blue, green, pink, purple and orange, with splashes of paint spreading out behind it. The design sits centrally on the frame against plain skin.

Other Elephant Splashes Watercolour wash

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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

Sit yourself down, and mind the pot, that's Mrs Quayle's fish stew and she'll have my ears if it goes cold. Now. You want the elephant. Everyone in Porthmellow knows the elephant, but they only know the end of it, the bit where the paint comes off on their sleeves.

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It was the winter the circus came in on the tide ferry with a grey beast called Dora who was sick to her back teeth of the road. Old Tom Hesketh, who painted the names on the lifeboats, took one look at her and decided she was too grey for anybody's liking. He pinned the net loft wall, sketched her with a stub of charcoal, quick and careless, because a drawing that's too careful dies on the plaster. Then he went at her with the tins he'd left out in the rain all winter. Blue from the lifeboat, green from the harbour gate, pink from Widow Crane's ribbons he'd begged off her washing line.

Every evening the colours ran. Every morning the gulls had a go at the splashes, thinking they were fish. Then one night Dora walked off that wall, or so Tom swore on his mother's grave, and out along the breakwater in the dark. Nobody saw her go. Only the wet prints on the stones, and a trail of paint drops shining like sweets all the way to the end, where the sea took them.

So when you smell turpentine on a wet morning down by the slipway, don't blame the boats. That's Tom's elephant, still shaking off the last of his colours on her way out to sea.