Black outline elephant tattoo with a patterned headdress and orange flowers across the shoulder and upper back.

Elephant and orange flowers on a shoulder

Botanical · Shoulder · Mixed · Photo

An outlined elephant wearing an ornate headdress faces forward, with its trunk curling to the left and its tusks visible. Orange and yellow flowers, shaded with black centres, frame the elephant on the shoulder and upper back, and a row of fine dotted chains hangs beneath it. Black linework is combined with warm orange and yellow fills, and the photograph is taken at an angle with the rest of the body softly out of focus.

Botanical Shoulder Back Elephant Sunflower Flower Headdress Mandala Dotted chain Tusk Trunk

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Pull your chairs in, the lot of you, and mind the paraffin lamp. No, the elephant was never called Mabel, whatever your uncle told you. Her name was Sarnia, and she came off a boat at Harwich in a crate stamped for the wrong town, which is how the Mallowby Travelling Fair got her so cheap. The keeper, a man called Dunmore with one good eye, put a headdress on her made of brass discs and red cloth, and his wife stitched little dotted chains of beads along its edges so it would catch the light of the rides.

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She was a quiet beast. She'd walk the field at dawn with her trunk curled up like a question mark, and wherever she stopped, poppies came up through the grass. Nobody planted them. The painter who did the wagons swore it was the sunflowers that followed her, not the other way round, and he drew them orange and gold on every side panel until the whole fair looked like it was on fire at sunset. Ilse, the girl who mucked out the stalls, used to say the elephant was only trying to find her way home.

In the September the fair was sold to a northern circus, and Dunmore had Sarnia loaded onto a flatbed by the old siding. Ilse climbed up with a bucket of apples and sat on the ramp beside her. The train whistle went, and Sarnia lifted her head, let the headdress slide off into the poppies, and turned her great grey back on the carriage. Dunmore swore and shouted, and then the engine pulled away empty, and he never got the animal aboard.

So if you walk past that siding in August, mind the ditch and look along the bank. You'll see the flowers still there, orange as a lamp, nodding at the rails as if they're waiting for a train that's already gone.