Neo-traditional colour tattoo of an elephant head in a jewelled headdress inside a dreamcatcher, on the side of the ribs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Elephant in a dreamcatcher on the ribs

Neo-trad · Ribs · Mixed · Photo

A grey elephant head wearing an ornate jewelled headdress sits within a black-lined dreamcatcher strung with coloured beads. Teal and purple feathers hang from the lower edge, and the grey shading gives the elephant a soft three-dimensional form. Bold outlines and saturated colour stand out against the skin of the side of the torso.

Neo-trad Ribs Elephant Dreamcatcher Feather Bead Headdress

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The elephant had been standing under the fish-market awning since before the rain started, and nobody in Harrow Lane could say who had let it in. It was grey and patient, with a headdress of beaded silk tied under its ears, and it watched the stalls the way a magistrate watches a queue. Ada Penrose sold willow hoops and thread from a barrow beside it, and she did not care for animals in her trade, because they knocked the hoops off the pegs.

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Her grandmother had taught her that a net of coloured beads and feathers, hung over a bed, would catch bad dreams before they reached the sleeper. The dreams tangled in the threads and stayed there until morning, when the sun burned them off. Ada had made a hundred such nets. Each feather came from a different bird, and each bead stood for a night somebody had got through. The elephant lowered its head and, very carefully, drew the teal feather from the bottom of her best net with the tip of its trunk.

Ada said nothing. She had been widowed in a wet March and had not slept properly since, and she understood that the creature was not stealing. It was carrying. The rain came harder and the elephant stood in it, feathers dripping from its headdress, and it seemed to Ada that the bad dreams of the whole lane were gathering on its forehead like water on a slate.

By the time the gutters ran clear the elephant had gone, leaving a single blue bead on the cobbles and a dent in the wet where its feet had been. Ada picked up the bead, threaded it onto the end of her barrow string, and hung the barrow on its hook. That night she slept through until light, and the net above her bed hung a little thinner, which was the only way she knew it had been doing its work.