Colour tattoo of two elephants among blue foliage with pink lilies near the shoulder, on an upper arm, in a loose watercolour-like style.

Elephants and lilies on an upper arm sleeve

Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A sleeve-style tattoo covers the upper arm, showing two elephants standing side by side in shaded blue and grey, with soft blue and green foliage behind them. Pink lilies and loose orange and pink washes extend up towards the shoulder. The shading is soft and painterly, with some dark outlines on the elephants and a blurred, wash-like finish across the background.

Upper arm Shoulder Elephant Lily Flower Foliage

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The river came over the water meadows again in the night, so we carried the herd of records up to the chapel loft and left the ledgers to the damp. Maren said the painting was the only thing worth the climb. She meant the elephants on the wall, not any animal, because nothing that size had walked this county since the Corridor closed and the old zoos were just rumour in the schoolbooks.

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We had no tubes of paint left, so I ground the blue from a broken lamp lens and boiled nettles down with salt for the green. The grey for the elephants came from ash and a little soot scraped off the flue. It took me two evenings to get the shadows right on the nearer one, the way the light sat on its back like a wet sheet. Maren stood behind me and kept saying it wanted to bleed, that the colours should run into each other the way they did on the old photographs, as if the picture were still deciding what it was.

The lilies were the hardest. Her grandmother had kept one photograph of a pond, the pink gone brown at the edges, and we copied it from that until the paper curled. The orange washes came from rust water we strained through cloth. By the last morning the wall looked like weather, with the two animals standing in the middle of it, heads low, as though they had only paused to drink.

When I went down to fetch water, the pond behind the chapel had drawn back, and there, pushed up through the silt, were real lilies, pink and loose. I dipped my fingers in the shallows and the cold water came away blue from the lens dust I hadn't washed off. I carried a handful up the ladder. Maren took my wrist and pressed my palm flat against the wet wall, and the colour went into the plaster just as she had said it would.