Black and grey blackwork design of an elephant head with ornate mandala panels, radiating lines and a skull below the trunk, shown as a flash drawing with no placement on the body.

Elephant head with skull and mandala

Blackwork · Black and grey · Flash

The design shows a front-facing elephant head with tusks, large ears and a curled trunk, framed by an ornate mandala and filigree panel above. A small skull sits beneath the trunk, and fine radiating lines extend out from the sides of the composition. It is rendered in solid black and grey with dense hatching, stippling and engraved-style linework on a black background.

Blackwork Elephant Skull Mandala Ornament Filigree Radiating lines

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The brass elephant came up in my net on the third morning of the Skerrow drift, tangled in a fathom of cod-end as if the sea had been keeping it for someone. A small skull came up with it, grey and cold as a stone from the bottom. Old Tobiah said elephants were bad luck on a boat and skulls were worse, so I put both in the lazarette and told him I would throw them back at the next slack tide. I was nineteen and had been told I was too soft for the deck, so I did not throw them back.

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That week the fleet was thin. Eleven boats had gone out from Skerrow and only seven were at the mole by Thursday, and the harbour master had chalked a black cross beside the Corrie Lass. At night I sat in the lazarette with the elephant across my knees and traced its ears, which were cut so finely they caught the lamplight like wet hair. Mam had a rule that you did not keep what the sea handed back without paying for it, and I had no idea what the price was.

On the Friday the wind backed and the fog came down thick as fleece. Tobiah took the wheel and went quiet. Under the bell buoy off the Tooth I heard a second bell, slow and brassy, which could not have been there. When I went below, the elephant's trunk was curled toward the hatch, though I was certain I had left it facing the wall. Tobiah said the piece had been cast in Hull for a Norwegian whaler that went down with every hand, and that the sea always sends back what it wants returned.

The fog lifted at first light and all seven boats came in through the gap one after another, their lamps low. Tobiah did not look at the lazarette as we passed the Tooth. I set the elephant on the wheelhouse sill with its trunk turned toward the harbour mouth, and there it stayed, dry and grey and watchful, until the day we sold the boat.