Black line drawing of an elephant built from roses, daisies, a peony, lilies and leaves, with leaf-shaped ears and a flower-covered trunk, in a botanical style.

Floral elephant line drawing

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

The drawing shows an elephant whose head is formed by a large rose, a daisy-like flower and a peony, with two broad heart-shaped leaves forming the ears. The trunk is made of stacked flowers and leaves, ending in a lily, and two small butterflies sit near the head. The work is rendered in clean black linework on white with no shading or colour, and the composition is centred and symmetrical.

Botanical Elephant Rose Daisy Peony Lily Leaf Butterfly Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mum had the boathook in both hands when the elephant came round the bend at Shiplake, rose-first, its great leaf ears spread wide on the current like a pair of wet hats. We had carved it from a lime plank the winter Dad bought the barge, and he had painted every petal himself, so I knew the sight of it the way you know your own front door in the dark.

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"Get the line on the trunk," Mum shouted. "Not the ear, Nell, the ears will tear."

I leaned out over the gunwale with my boots hooked under the rail and caught the lily at the end of the trunk. It was cold and smooth and heavier than I expected. The trunk was stacked with carved marigolds and dahlias, each one nicked where the river had been at it for years, but the wood held. We hauled it alongside, and I saw something I had never noticed in all those years of dusting it: a folded square of paper wedged behind the peony, gone soft as cloth.

It was Ada's handwriting, the woman who had sold us the barge and taught Dad to carve. She had written, in pencil, that the elephant would always come home to whoever pulled it out of the water. Below that was a list of the flowers in the order she had planted them in her garden, and a note that the lily was the only one she had never managed to make bloom.

We tied it to the stern, ears up, and it rode home beside us all the way to the lock. Mum said nothing about the ears. I put the note in my coat, and when we moored I went back out in the dusk and tucked a sprig of fresh marigold into the lily's throat, so it would have something to show for the river.