Elephant, pocket watch and anchor design
Neo-trad · Black and grey · Flash
A black ink linework drawing on paper of an elephant wearing an ornate headdress and beaded necklace, set among feathers, a pocket watch with a moon above it, an anchor and rope. Clouds and scrolling shapes frame the composition in a tall vertical layout. The drawing uses fine outlines with dotted and stippled shading and no colour.
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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction
The elephant came aboard at Gravesend on the second Tuesday of the ebb, and nobody on the Persephone could say who had paid her passage. Tobias Quayle, the ship's clockmaker, was sent to the purser's cabin for her papers. He came back with a feather from her headdress tucked behind his ear and a pocket watch in his fist, saying the animal had pressed both into his hands as if they were change owed.
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The watch had stopped at a quarter past eleven, and he could not coax it back. Every night for a week he sat on the coal hatch with the case open across his knees, winding and listening, while the elephant stood by the windlass with her trunk looped over the anchor chain. Above them the moon came up over the Channel, fat and lopsided, and the sea laid silver scrolls along the hull like the edges of a gilded frame.
On the seventh night the watch ticked once, then again. Tobias looked up and saw the elephant lifting the chain link by link, slow as a bell-ringer, and understood she was not taking the ship's weight but setting it down. He wound the watch to the proper hour, and the moon slid behind a cloud.
In the morning the purser's ledger listed her as cargo, weight unknown. Beside the entry Tobias wrote, in his small careful hand, that she had kept better time than any of them.
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