Black and grey geometric tattoo of a front-facing elephant head with a cube, triangles and dotwork halo, on a forearm.

Elephant head with geometric linework

Geometric · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A front-facing elephant head fills the centre of the design, with its tusks and ears shaded in fine parallel lines. Above it sits a cube, and below the trunk a triangle and circle are drawn with dotted construction lines. A small clover outline sits at the lower left, and the piece is rendered entirely in black and grey ink.

Geometric Dotwork Forearm Elephant Cube Triangle Circle Clover Geometric line Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The snow had shut the pass for nine days when the showman's elephant came down the road to Hallen Ford. Maud Corrie, who kept the inn, said she would not have a beast that size in her yard, but her husband Tobias had already dragged the barn doors open. The elephant was called Dorrin, grey as slate, and she stood in the straw with her head low, as if the beams were set too near.

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The showman, a thin man named Pell, said she had been bought off a ship at Bristol and had never once been cold. Each evening Dorrin pressed her forehead to the barn wall and drew in the frost with the tip of her trunk: a box, then a three-cornered shape, then a ring with a mark at its heart. Maud's daughter Ina, who was eleven and counted everything, copied the lines onto the back of a flour sack. They matched the beams, the cart wheel and the door latch. Pell said the beast was working out the way home.

On the ninth night the thaw had not come and the lamp burned low. Ina asked the elephant where home was. Dorrin lifted her trunk, traced the ring, then set its tip on the point of the triangle, and the snow beneath sank to bare earth in the shape of a door. Tobias said it was only the heat off the hearth. Maud said nothing and fetched more wood.

By morning the road was open. Pell loaded his cart, and the elephant walked out into the white with Ina at her side, the flour sack folded in her hand. At the foot of the pass Ina looked back and saw the bare patch still there, square and clean, the only dark thing on the hill. She kept the sack in her apron pocket after that, where she put the things she meant to find again.