Pen sketch of a tattoo design showing an elephant wearing beaded jewellery, framed by lotus flowers and leaves, with no body placement visible.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Elephant and lotus flowers design sketch

Botanical · Colour · Flash

A line drawing of an elephant's head in profile, with its trunk curling at the lower left, wearing a beaded necklace and a forehead ornament. Lotus blooms and leaves surround the head and trunk, and a few small dots suggest texture on the trunk. The linework is sketchy and uses a single reddish-purple ink on pale paper, with no shading and the design filling most of the frame.

Botanical Neo-trad Elephant Lotus Flower Leaves Bead Necklace Trunk Jewellery

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Pargeter had let rooms above the chip shop in Cleethorpes for thirty years, and she did not allow animals, so when the travelling fair left in October and the elephant was found tied to the promenade railings with a note pinned to her ear, she did not know what to do with it except feed it. The elephant was called Nell. Nobody could say who had named her, and the man who owned her had taken the Tuesday train and not come back.

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Nell ate the cabbage leaves from the back of the greengrocer's and drank from the fountain by the bandstand until the council man came to see about it. He said she could not stay. Mrs Pargeter said she could stay in the yard behind the boarding house if she kept her trunk out of the washing. So she stayed, and the lodgers grumbled over their breakfast kippers, then came down with buns in their coat pockets.

Every morning Nell lifted her trunk over the yard wall and picked lotus blooms from the drowned allotments past the sea wall, where the flowers grew in the silt at low tide. She laid them on the back step one at a time, pink side up, until the step was covered. Mrs Pargeter put them in a jug on the windowsill and said nothing, because the old women on the front said an elephant that brings you flowers is asking to be kept.

When the fair came back in spring for its wagons, the man with the whip found Nell asleep across the yard with a ring of wet shells on her brow and a line of kelp wound round her feet. He stood at the gate a long time. Then he paid Mrs Pargeter the back rent in silver, shook her hand, and walked off down the front without his elephant, and nobody on the promenade ever saw him again.