Colourful neo-traditional tattoo of a smiling elephant in a decorated headdress riding a bicycle beside a patterned ball, on a person's side ribs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Circus elephant on a bicycle on the ribs

Neo-trad · Ribs · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows a cheerful elephant wearing a patterned headdress with a feathered plume, riding a bicycle with a ball rolling beside it. The elephant's body is decorated with an ornate mandala-like pattern, and the bicycle, ball and outlines are drawn with bold, dark linework. Shading gives the elephant and ball volume, and the composition wraps across the side of the torso.

Neo-trad Ribs Elephant Bicycle Ball Headdress Mandala Plume

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The last show of the season was in a sports hall in Sleaford, under strip lights that made the sawdust look like cardboard. Eleven people had paid to sit in the cold. Mabel didn't mind. She had her headdress on before the lorry doors were open, the feathered plume bent flat from the drive, and she was already eyeing the red ball as if it owed her money.

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Dad had sold the big tent in February and the rest of the kit by April. What was left was Mabel, the bicycle with its blue frame, two tatty ponies nobody wanted, and me, doing the ticket table and the tannoy. Mabel had learned to ride from a Dutch trainer when she was nine, and she still took the bicycle's handlebars like a gentleman taking a lady's glove. Her pedals creaked on the left side. I'd oiled them that morning with a bottle of Mum's sewing machine oil, which felt like the most dignified thing I'd done all year.

Halfway through the ride she stopped in the centre circle and looked at the exit doors. The ball rolled on without her and bumped against the wall. Nobody clapped. Then Mabel lifted her trunk, folded it into a slow bow, and pushed off towards the doors as if the show had been planned that way. The ball went after her. The eleven of us stood up, not because we'd been told to, and followed them out into the car park, where the rain had turned the tarmac silver under the sodium lamps.

She rode the length of the car park, past the lorries and the chip van, and stopped at a line of abandoned shopping trolleys. The ball caught up and bumped gently into her front wheel. Dad, who had not come out, watched through the glass with his hands in his pockets. I think he knew what she was saying. She was done with rings. Some things just need to be ridden to their ending.