Fine line tattoo of a patterned elephant above the words La famille est tout, on the back of a woman's neck.

Elephant and French script on the neck

Fine line · Neck · Colour · Photo

The photograph shows the back of a woman's neck with blonde hair pulled to one side. Above a line of cursive script reading La famille est tout sits a small elephant outline with a floral pattern filled into its body. The thin, even linework and the simple composition centred on the nape keep the focus on the tattoo.

Fine line Neck Elephant Script French text Floral pattern Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Old Marit kept the wooden elephant on the windowsill of the net loft, the one her father had carved from driftwood the winter before the boats went out and did not come back. It had a blanket of painted green and red flowers along its back, and beneath its feet, in letters worn almost smooth, were the words every child on Harrow Skerry learned to read before they learned to swim.

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When Tomas was nine he decided he would take the elephant across the sound to the mainland, where his brother had gone to work the ferry docks and had not written since midsummer. His mother said the sea did not care for carvings. Tomas said the sea had taken enough without asking, so he wrapped the elephant in an oilskin and wedged it against the thwart of the small punt with a coil of rope.

The crossing took the whole of a grey afternoon. Twice the wind turned and twice he bailed with a tin cup, and he talked to the elephant the way his grandfather talked to the gulls, telling it how far they were from home. At dusk the lights of the harbour town showed like a row of loose teeth. A woman on the quay, who turned out to be his brother's landlady, took one look at the boat and fetched a lantern without a word.

His brother was asleep above the chandlery. When he woke and saw the wooden beast on the table, with its flowers catching the lamp and Tomas sitting soaked beside it, he laughed until he coughed. Tomas went home on the morning tide, and the elephant stayed behind. In October a letter came back across the sound with a pressed flower tucked inside, and beneath the usual news was a line in careful pencil: it is on my windowsill now, and the sea has not taken it.