Small black-outlined elephant with grey shading reaching up to a pink heart balloon, tattooed on the upper back near the shoulder blade.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Elephant holding a pink heart balloon

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A small cartoon elephant with grey shaded body and black outlines reaches its trunk up towards a pink heart-shaped balloon on a thin black string. The elephant is set against a plain area of skin, with the balloon placed above and slightly to the left of the animal. The pink fill on the heart is the only colour, with the rest of the tattoo in black and grey.

Back Elephant Balloon Heart String

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody on the quay at Lowestoft could agree whose elephant it was. Gran Pearl swore it belonged to the Dunmore boy, who had fed it crisps from the back of the Anna Rose every Saturday for a month, and Dunmore swore it belonged to the gulls. What everyone agreed on was the balloon. It was pink, shaped like a heart, and it had been tied to a bollard by a length of black string since the morning the fleet came in short-handed.

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I was sixteen and gutting herring on the Anna Rose when the wind backed round to the north-east and the string gave way. The balloon lifted off the bollard as if it had waited years for permission. Old Tam Harrow said it was a bad omen, which he said about most things, but he stopped the winch anyway, and we all stood with our knives dripping and watched the heart climb over the breakwater. The little grey elephant kept its trunk stretched up towards it, the way a child reaches for a parent's hand at the kerb.

My father shouted for me to get the boat back on course, so I did, but I kept one eye on the sky until the pink was no bigger than a fish scale. Tam said we'd never see it again. He said that about the Dunmore boy's crisps too, and about my mother's kettle, and he was wrong about those as well.

Three days later, off Smith's Knoll, a speck of colour bobbed in our wake while the gulls argued over the offcuts. I hauled it aboard with the boathook. The string was still tied in a sailor's knot, and the elephant was gone, but the balloon was still full and still pointing at the sky.