Grey shaded elephant tattoo with blue watercolour-style splashes and the words I love you even still, even now, on the forearm.

Elephant with blue splash and quote

Forearm · Mixed · Photo

An elephant walks left in soft grey shading, with its ear, tusks and legs rendered in tonal greys and small dark dots. Loose blue splashes sit behind and beneath the animal, with a typewriter-style line of text reading I love you even still, even now along the bottom. The image is a close, slightly angled photo of the healed tattoo on the arm against a plain background.

Forearm Elephant Splash Quote Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, sit down, the cake will keep, and I will tell you about the elephant that came out of the rain at Mirrin Ford. Your grandmother's people were there, and mine, and the river was in flood that year, brown as strong tea, the colour of a kitchen table after a long argument.

Keep reading

Old Bashir Tallow kept the ferry, and he had a typewriter in his hut that he used for nothing but letters to the District Office, which never answered. One wet morning a grey elephant came down the bank, slow as a deacon, and stood at the water's edge looking across at the far shore, where a girl called Ines was waiting with a bundle of wedding linen on her head. Nobody had sent for the elephant. Nobody ever does.

Bashir typed on a paper slip and pinned it to the elephant's ear, the way you would pin a name on a parcel. The slip read: I love you even still, even now. The letters had gone soft from the damp, so it looked like a sentence written by someone who had been crying and laughing at once. Ines read it across the river and laughed so hard she dropped the linen in the mud, and that was the end of her sulking about the ferry fare.

The elephant walked into the water, lifting her great feet one by one, and crossed without once looking down at the flood. When she reached Ines she bowed her head and let the girl tie the slip to her tusk. Some say it was a joke. My mother said it was a promise. Bashir said the elephant had simply never forgotten the way home. Pass the bread, and mind the candles.