Black outline tattoo of an elephant with its trunk raised, decorated with spirals, on a shoulder.

Elephant with raised trunk on shoulder

Fine line · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows an elephant standing side on with its trunk curled upwards and its ears held out. It is drawn in a single black outline with hatched lines on the trunk and back, and spiral swirls decorate the shoulder, leg and head. The design is entirely black ink on pale skin, shown in a close, slightly angled photograph.

Fine line Shoulder Elephant Trunk Spiral Swirl Outline

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The elephant came down the Tallow Road in the spring the river froze twice, and nobody in Harrow Cross could say who had sent it. It walked into the square at noon with its trunk lifted high, as if it were smelling the bakery across the way, and the baker's boy dropped a tray of rolls into the gutter and did not pick them up.

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Mrs Odile Penhallow, who kept the post office and believed in nothing she could not stamp, went out with a ledger under her arm and told the beast it was blocking the pillar box. The elephant looked at her with one small eye, then turned side on and lowered its great ears, slow as curtains. Her hand went to her throat. She had seen the swirls on its shoulder before, she said later, though she could not say where, only that they were the same curls her grandmother had painted on the lids of biscuit tins.

It stood there three days. On the fourth morning the town woke to find the trunk had come down and was resting on the bench by the chapel, and under it, folded neatly, was a letter addressed to the widow Penhallow. Inside was no more than a list of the things she had lost in the flood of 1931: a green ribbon, a silver thimble, a boy's cap, a single brass key. Beneath the list, in careful capitals, someone had written KEEP THE GATE OPEN.

She found the key in the back of her drawer that same afternoon, though she had not known she had it. The elephant was gone when she went out to look, leaving only dust and a long curl of mark in the road, and she kept the gate of her yard unlatched every night after that, in case.