Black and grey realism elephant tattoo with a dotwork mandala and sunflowers on an upper arm.

Elephant with mandala and sunflowers on upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A large elephant head faces forward on the upper arm, with tusks, detailed wrinkled skin and shaded eyes. A dotwork mandala and lotus-style flower sit above the head, with sunflowers on either side and leaves below the trunk. The work is entirely in black and grey, with soft shading across the skin and crisp dark linework.

Realism Dotwork Botanical Upper arm Elephant Mandala Lotus Sunflower Leaves Tusk

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Put that kettle on again, Dilys, and stop turning that net over in your lap, because you'll hear this one proper or not at all. Your father never believed a word of it, and he's past believing anything now, so the wager's off and I can tell it straight.

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The March gale caught the Marigold Bell past the Stanner buoy, and by the second night the whole of Haddow Staithe was stood on the wall with lanterns, counting boats that were not coming. Eleven had limped in. Old Amos Penrose and his two boys were still out there, and the women had stopped pretending to talk about anything else. Then, a little before dawn, something came up the shingle through the spray. It was an elephant, grey as slate, walking as if the tide were its own front step. Lotus petals and dotted rings sat on its brow like a crown painted with a fine brush, and a pair of sunflowers was tucked behind its ears, bright in that grey light.

It did not look at the women. It walked straight down the slipway into the surf, and its trunk, ringed all the way down like a tree grown in a hurry, came curling over the waves and took hold of the Bell's stern line. Amos came up out of the water with his boys hanging on his coat, blue with cold and swearing at the sea. When that trunk lifted them onto the wall, the elephant breathed out, slow and warm, over every one of them, and the cold went out of their hands like a tide turning.

Next morning the Marigold Bell was tied up sound at the quay and the elephant was nowhere on the shingle. What was there were sunflower seeds in every apron pocket in the Staithe, and a chalk ring on the net-loft door, dotted round like the ones on its trunk. Nobody planted them, mind, but the sunflowers came up along the harbour wall that summer, every one of them turned the same way, out towards where the storm had been.