Grey shaded elephant head with green leaves tattooed on the top of a foot, with black toenail polish visible below.

Elephant head with leaves on a foot

Neo-trad · Other · Mixed · Photo

A tattoo of an elephant head faces forward on the top of a bare foot, with its ears spread and trunk curled downward. The elephant is shaded in soft greys with bold dark outlines, and a sprig of green leaves curves beneath it on either side. The photograph is taken from above on a pale wooden surface, with the toes and black nail polish in the lower part of the frame.

Neo-trad Other Elephant Leaves Foliage Trunk

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Tom,

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I'm writing this on the back of a fuel receipt because the pen in the cab has run dry, and because you won't believe what came down the Saltmarsh road last night. I'd been stuck at Dunmore Wells since the water pump gave out, sleeping under the lorry with a tin of peaches for supper. Around dusk the dust turned gold and something grey came walking out of it, slow as a ferry, ears spread wide like sails.

It was an elephant. An old cow with a split ear and a chain scar on one leg, no keeper in sight. The travelling show that owned her must have left her behind when the money ran out. She walked straight past me to the tamarisk fence behind the petrol station, where Mrs Okafor keeps her goats, and she pulled down a sprig of green leaves with her trunk, curling the end of it like a question mark before she ate.

Every evening after that, she came back. Mrs Okafor started leaving a bucket of water by the pump, and I started stripping leaves off the fence for her with my bare hands. Last night the elephant stopped beside my cab, lifted a single leaf, and laid it on the bonnet like a gift. Then she turned and went off into the dark with her ears folded. I've pressed it in your old atlas at page forty one, the desert page. Come and see it before it goes brown.

Love, Dan