Solid black silhouette tattoo of a large elephant with a small mouse by its trunk, on the side of a thigh.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Elephant silhouette with mouse on thigh

Blackwork · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A solid black silhouette of a large elephant with big ears faces left, with a much smaller mouse-like figure beside its trunk. The fill is flat black with a thin pale outline tracing the ear edge, and the shapes are simple with no internal shading. The design sits on the side of the thigh against plain pale skin, with a white garment at the top edge of the frame.

Blackwork Thigh Elephant Mouse Silhouette

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The snow came down so hard in the night that the lane to Hollin Farm disappeared, and by first light the circus lorries sat useless at the gate like beached boats. You are the one who has to carry the news across the yard. Gussie has been standing by the byre door since four, ears spread wide and still, the way she stands when she is listening for a bell that will never ring again.

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Your boots crunch on the frozen ruts with the mangold bucket hooked over one arm. Those ears are the first thing you see every morning, each one as wide as a bedsheet and grey at the edges where the frost has settled. Pip is perched on the rim of the left one, a mouse no bigger than a walnut, his tail curled round the fold of skin like a bell rope. When you tip the bucket, he slides down the trunk and drops into the straw, bold as a sergeant, and stands square in the path between you and the feed.

Mrs Ferris said the troupe would be gone by March. She said it in the kitchen with her hands wrapped round a mug while the ringmaster counted out the last of the wages in coins that smelt of his pocket. Nobody had thought about the elephant. The lorry ramp is too narrow for an animal who has to turn her head sideways to fit, and Gussie will not walk up it unless Pip goes first, and Pip will not go anywhere without Gussie standing guard at the bottom.

So you do what the farm has always done with stubborn things. You fetch the old blue horse blanket from the tack room and drape it over her back, then lift one ear gently and tuck the corner inside it. Pip climbs onto the cloth, turns round three times, and settles into the fold beside her eye. Gussie lets out a long breath that clouds the cold air, and the snow starts again, soft and steady, filling in the tracks you made from the gate.