Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Elephant silhouette with landscape fill on ribs

Ribs · Colour · Photo

The image shows two views of the same tattoo on a person's side, one close and one wider. An elephant in profile is outlined in solid black, and its body is filled with layered bands of blue, yellow and pink that suggest hills and water under a sunset sky. The soft gradients and clean edges give it a painted, landscape-like finish, and the tattoo sits on the rib area.

Ribs Elephant Silhouette Landscape Hill Wave Sunset

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Tomas Pryce was still shovelling slack when the elephant came up the tip road, and he kept his eyes on the wagon, because a man who stops to stare at things in a colliery gets buried by them. Behind it the sky over Cwm Brith was going the colour of plums and rose, and the hills had turned the blue of deep water, all of it lying flat on the valley as if someone had poured it there to cool.

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The elephant had no rider and no keeper. It walked slowly with its trunk curled at the tip, and where its grey hide should have been there were bands of the evening itself: a strip of pink for the upper ridge, a run of rippling blue for the river that ran black under the tips, and a yellow lens of late light sitting low in its belly. The women at chapel said it was carrying the sunset home, because the pit had taken the sun from the valley every winter for a hundred years and something had to give it back.

Tomas followed it to the old drift mouth. He had three children, a debt at the tommy shop, and no patience left for stories. But the beast stopped at the lip of the shaft and lowered its head, and the bands in its side began to slide, slow as a tide, down its legs and into the dark. The blue went first, then the pink, and the yellow last, pooling at the bottom like honey poured into a well.

When the men came up at six the valley was dark except for a thin rim of light on the Brith. Tomas came up last, black to the elbows, and found the lamp room lit gold from the inside. He never told anyone what he saw down there, only that the coal face was warm to the touch that week, and that he went back each morning whistling a tune nobody in Cwm Brith could name.