Ink line drawing of a baby elephant raising its trunk to hold a balloon on a string, a tattoo design sketch with no body placement shown.

Baby elephant holding a balloon

Black and grey · Flash

A baby elephant sits on a ground line of loose strokes, its trunk raised to hold a round balloon on a long string. The linework is bold and uneven, with a few short hatch marks on the balloon and the legs. The drawing is in dark brown ink on pale blue paper, with no shading or colour fill.

Elephant Balloon String Trunk

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The balloon man had sold the last red one to a boy beside the dodgems, and the boy had let go of it before his sugar floss was finished. By four o'clock it was hanging above the Big Wheel on a string as long as a skipping rope, turning slowly in the cold air over the empty field. Nobody on the fairground could reach it except Pim, the baby elephant who had been tethered by the caravans since the show came to Millbrook in October.

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"Elephants don't care about balloons," said Doreen, who had looked after Pim since he was a day old and had never once been wrong about him. But Pim had sat down in the wet grass with his backside in a puddle and his trunk stretched up as far as it would go, and he was making the low rumble he saved for things he wanted. The string swung just beyond the tip of him. He shuffled forward on his haunches, then forward again, until his trunk looped over the cord and held it.

The boy came running across the field with a shilling in his fist, ready to pay for a second balloon he did not really want. He stopped at the edge of the mud and stared. Pim lowered his trunk very slowly, the way Doreen had taught him to hand over the buckets, and gave the string back, curled once around the tip like a ribbon on a parcel.

The boy took it in both hands. The balloon bobbed above them both, pale against the darkening sky, and Pim sighed through his nose and settled into the straw with the air of a creature who had done a fair day's work.