Collage of stylised animal designs on a white background, including red ornamental birds, owls, black swans, elephants, pink cranes and multicoloured giraffes.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Collage of stylised animal line art designs

Mixed · Flash

A collage of six stylised animal illustrations on a plain white background: red ornamental birds, a pair of owls, two black swans, a mother and young elephant, two pink wading birds and a pair of giraffes. The owls, elephants and giraffes are drawn in fine black or coloured outlines, while the birds use solid red and black fills. The sheet is arranged as a loose grid with no text or borders, and the designs are shown without any body placement.

Bird Phoenix Owl Swan Elephant Flamingo Giraffe Animal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Nell, the calf took her first proper breath on the third morning out of Falmouth, and I have been meaning to write since, only the ink froze in the bottle twice and the mate says that is bad luck. Mr Greaves has named her Pell, after a horse he lost at Epsom, though nobody in the hold calls her anything but Little Pell.

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The mother is Hester on the manifest and Madame to the men, and she stands in the hold with her neck bent under the beams like a clerk at a low desk. At night she lowers her head through the slats and the calf noses up under her chin, and the stokers, who swore they would not look, stop shovelling to watch. Abel, the keeper, says she has not touched her feed since the sea got rough, and that a giraffe who will not eat is a giraffe that dies.

Greaves wants them sold at the Cape, the mother and the calf separately, because he reckons a matched pair fetches less than two strangers. I told him the manifest lists two animals and he can count them himself. He laughed the way men laugh when they have already decided to be reasonable later.

So tonight I went down with a lantern and sat with them. The calf folded her long legs under her like a deckchair, and the mother bent over us both, slow as a sail coming down, and for an hour nobody on the ship had a price. Keep the lamp lit at home, and write back about the weather. Your loving brother, Will.