Front-facing elephant head tattoo in grey shading with sketchy lines, with red and blue watercolour splashes, on the inner forearm.

Elephant head with watercolour splashes on forearm

Realism · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A front-facing elephant head with tusks, ears and a curled trunk tip is drawn in grey shading with loose, sketchy linework. Soft red and blue watercolour washes sit behind and beside the head, framing it. The motif is centred on the forearm and fills most of the frame against a dark leather background.

Realism Forearm Elephant Trunk Tusk Ear Watercolour

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The tent had been patched so many times that on wet nights it dripped in the shape of its repairs, and Nell stood under the worst of them with a bucket while the last of the crowd filed out past the sodden programmes. Across the sawdust, Bessie stood with her head low and her ears spread like wet sails, waiting for a feed that was not coming.

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Mr Harrow had come up from Margate with a cheque folded into his waistcoat pocket. Nell had read it twice, once for the figure and once for the word immediately. The circus owed the feed merchant, the farrier and the printer who still ran posters of a lion that had died before Nell was born. Bessie had carried her on the great grey dome of her neck the summer she turned nine, and years later had lifted a fallen tent pole off Papa's chest, curling her trunk round the iron as gently as a hand.

That evening Nell took the lamp and walked her out past the caravans to the field where the sea showed grey beyond the hedge. She unbuckled the harness and let the old animal wander down to the shingle. Bessie waded knee-deep, raised her trunk, and sprayed the last of the sunset over her own back, so that the red light ran off her grey hide and broke apart on the ripples like paint that had nowhere else to go.

Nell watched until the lamp burned low. In the morning the cheque would still be there, and so would the question it asked. For now she sat on the wet stones and let the tide come up round her boots, while the elephant stood in the water with the sky sliding off her ears.