Black and grey tattoo of an elephant with an obelisk on its back and long spindly legs, sitting on the front of a thigh.

Elephant with obelisk on thigh

Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows an elephant with a draped saddle cloth and a tall obelisk balanced on its back, its legs stretched into long, thin stilts that extend down the leg. The linework is bold and dark, with soft shading on the elephant's head, body and saddle. The design is in black and grey ink and runs vertically along the thigh, with the tattooed skin filling most of the frame.

Thigh Elephant

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lamp at Scarrow Point had been dark for nine nights when Ada Penhale found the elephant on the shingle, standing in the surf up to its knees. Its legs were impossibly long, thin as ship's rigging, and it had been wading towards the rocks as if following a voice. On its back, lashed to a saddle cloth stitched with pale eyes, rode the old stone marker from the chapel graveyard, a tapering column that should have been lying in the nettles.

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Ada had no business with elephants. She kept the light because her father had, and because nobody on the mainland would take a post where the wind wrote its own weather. She waded out with the coil of rope from the boathouse. The animal lowered its trunk and sniffed at her wet coat, then knelt, unfolding its stilt legs one joint at a time, until the column tipped and she caught it against her shoulder. It weighed nothing, or nothing she could feel.

Together they climbed the tower stair, the elephant ducking under the lintel, its legs clattering on the iron rungs like someone counting. At the gallery she set the obelisk on its bracket, where it fitted as though the place had been measured for it. She trimmed the wick and struck the match, and the beam swung out across the water. Behind her the elephant folded its legs and settled, a grey hill against the lantern glass, and did not move again.

By morning the fishing boats were home. The island children swore the beast had gone back down the cliff path before dawn, stepping carefully over the edge, but Ada found its tracks only in the wet sand at the tideline, long and narrow and deliberate. The obelisk was still standing on its bracket, throwing a thin shadow down the length of the rocks.