Colour tattoo of a grey elephant sitting in a wooden tub with blue water spraying from its trunk, placed on the side of the ribs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Elephant bathing in a tub on the ribs

Neo-trad · Ribs · Colour · Photo

A grey cartoon elephant sits in a wooden tub and sprays a stream of blue water from its trunk, which forms a wavy blue and pale pink shape above it. Bold black outlines define the elephant, tub and pebbles, with flat fills of blue, turquoise, pink and grey. The design is shown in close view on the side of the body, with the tattoo filling most of the frame.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Ambrose Tilling had complained about the elephant for a fortnight before she thought to look over the hedge. The beast had come out of the beech wood at the edge of Little Wenning on a wet Tuesday, mud to the shoulders, and had simply stood in the lane until the carter fetched the cooper's oak tub from behind the forge. Nobody knew whose elephant it was. The travelling fair had gone east a week before with two lions and a man who swallowed swords, and the men of the village agreed it was not their business to say who had been left behind.

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The cooper's boy filled the tub from the brook with a bucket and a great deal of swearing. The elephant climbed in as neatly as a bishop getting into a pew, lifted its trunk, and sent a fountain of water higher than the church weathervane. It fell back over the lane in a blue curtain that caught the light, and the children who had gathered at the gate shrieked and ran into it. By evening the ruts were full, the ducks had opinions, and Mrs Tilling's washing had been rinsed twice without anyone asking.

The village tried to be cross about it. The parish council drafted a letter to the fair's agents in Ipswich, and the letter came back marked with a stamp that said the agents had moved on. The vicar asked the elephant to leave the churchyard yew alone. It did not, and nobody had the heart to stop it.

In August the well ran low, and the children carried pebbles from the brook in their pockets to line the tub's bottom so the elephant would not slip. By the time the first frost came there were hundreds of them, blue and grey and speckled, and each one had been carried by someone who had decided, quietly, that the elephant was theirs to keep.

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