Dark outlined elephant motif on the top of a finger, with a thin line running down to a teal disc, on a hand wearing blue gloves.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Elephant motif on a finger

Hand · Mixed · Photo

A small tattoo on the side of a finger shows a dark, outlined shape at the top that resembles an elephant's head, with a thin, segmented line running down the finger. At the lower end sits a round teal-blue disc with a lighter highlight. The linework is mostly black and grey and the image is a close, well-framed crop of the hand against a blue glove.

Hand Elephant Finger

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dr Haslam had the stethoscope off a travelling menagerie the summer the big top came through Market Deeping, and he never explained how a circus man came to own such a thing. The chestpiece was a blue enamel disc no bigger than a half-crown, and the tubing ran up from it, ribbed and dark, to a headpiece cast in the shape of an elephant's head, its trunk curled over the earpieces as if it were listening too.

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I was seventeen and the surgery's only junior, which meant I scrubbed the instruments and carried the bags out to the Morris. On Thursdays the old man let me press the disc to the chests of children who came in with croup, while he sat with his eyes shut and counted. Mrs Pargeter's boy said the elephant sounded like a kettle. Dr Haslam said that was the point. A patient who laughed would breathe easier.

The winter the fog sat on the fens for three weeks, a farmhand came in grey at the lips while the doctor was out at a confinement in Bourne. I listened myself, the cold disc against his ribs and the trunk pressed to my own ear, and heard nothing but my pulse. I held it there until the tubing seemed to hum, and then I had it: a slow, wet rhythm, low down, the man still with us.

When Dr Haslam came back at dawn he took the stethoscope, turned it over once, and set it in its velvet case without a word. He left it to me in his will, the only thing he ever gave anyone that wasn't written in a ledger. I still carry it in my coat, though I stopped pretending long ago that I could hear anything but the trains.