Black and grey dotwork tattoo of two adult elephants leading three calves in a line across the upper back.

Elephant family walking across the upper back

Dotwork · Back · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows two adult elephants and three smaller calves walking left to right along a single ground line. The figures are rendered with fine stippled dots that build up the shading on their bodies, trunks and ears. The image is black and grey, with a soft blurred background and the upper back and neck of the wearer in frame.

Dotwork Realism Back Elephant Calf Family Animal Wildlife

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The herd came down the shingle at the turn of the tide, the way it had every spring since the fleet was first hauled above the high-water mark at Porthlennick. Nobody in the village could say where they walked from. Mabel Penrose, who kept the net loft, swore the big cow led them, and the three calves followed close behind like dinghies on a short rope.

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Ben Tregarthen had been out three weeks with nothing in his hold. He stood in the wet with his boots full of sea and watched the old cow stop beside his upturned boat and lift her trunk toward the mast. Her ears moved slowly, the way a woman's hands move when she is counting. Then she turned and walked back toward the water, and the calves turned with her, and nobody in the harbour spoke until they were gone.

Ben did not sleep that night. At first light he launched alone and rowed where the herd had walked, out past the Black Carn where the seals sleep, and the water there was so thick with mackerel that his oars struck them. He filled the hold twice before noon and came home with his face burned red and his hands shaking.

The village still keeps the custom. Each spring the boats leave one fish on the sand at the turn of the tide, and in the morning there are five prints in the wet shingle, two large and three small, walking out to sea. They never come back the same way, and the tide does not wash them out until noon.