Grey shaded elephant head with a colour sunflower at the trunk, tattooed on the upper thigh.

Elephant head and sunflower on a thigh

Thigh · Mixed · Photo

A large elephant head in profile fills most of the frame, with its ears, trunk and tusk shaded in soft grey tones. A sunflower in orange and yellow petals with a dark brown centre sits below the trunk, curling around its tip. The black outlines and smooth grey shading contrast with the warm colour of the flower against the skin.

Thigh Elephant Sunflower Trunk Tusk Ear Petal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The hall smelled of floor polish and urn tea, and nobody had yet worked out who was who, when old Winnie Hale stood up from the trestle table and asked if anyone still remembered the story about the elephant. Nobody did except Winnie, who was seventy-eight and had outlived two husbands and a bad hip. She told it anyway, plainly, the way her mother had told it to her in the back kitchen.

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There was once an elephant called Marrow who lived in the big house at the top of Chapel Lane. Every child who passed the gate was told to bring her a sunflower, for she would not eat until she had one. The children argued over whose turn it was, and the flowers grew tall along the wall, and each September their heads turned slowly to face the schoolhouse, because that was where the children went to learn their sums.

The year the schoolhouse closed, Marrow walked down the lane with a sunflower wound round her trunk and stood at the gate. She asked for nothing. She only waited until the last child came out with his satchel, a boy called Dennis Fairbrother who had copied his sums from the girl beside him. She gave him the flower and turned back up the lane, and he never forgot the look she gave him, which was the look of someone who had remembered his name.

Winnie finished, and the hall went quiet. Then a grey-haired man at the far end set down his cup and said he still had the seed packet in his coat pocket. Nobody asked which of them had been the boy.