Black and grey realism tattoo of the elephant-headed deity Ganesha with an ornate headdress on the back of a hand, holding two black pencils.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ganesha tattoo on the back of a hand

Realism · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A hand is held towards the camera, showing a detailed black and grey tattoo of the elephant-headed deity Ganesha wearing an ornate, patterned headdress. The shading is smooth, with fine detail in the trunk, tusks and ornamentation, and the trunk runs down across the fingers. Two black pencils with red and white tips are held between the fingers, and the background is softly blurred.

Realism Hand Ganesha Elephant Deity Headdress Pencil

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Four bells and the galley is still dark when you pull the pencils from your apron pocket, one with its white tip worn to a nub, the other red at the end from ticking off tins. The Maud Harrow rolls gently on the swell and every pan on its hook swings in the same slow arc, like a congregation agreeing to disagree. Your list is pinned to the bulkhead beside the kettle, and the figures on it have stopped making sense.

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Flour is short by two sacks. Water is down a tank. The bosun wants porridge for thirty-one men by six, and the brass elephant the last cook left on the spice shelf is watching you with his small patient eyes. You rub his trunk with your thumb, the way your grandmother rubbed the doorpost of every house she ever lived in, and tell him you know he is the one who clears the road. He has never once answered. You light the range anyway.

By five the sums are still wrong, so you lay the pencils side by side on the chopping board to think. Red for what has gone out. White for what should be here. The gap is the length of a grown man's forearm, and that is when you notice the crate under the bench has a fresh hinge, and the lad from the engine room has been sleeping beside the flour bins with his boots on. Nobody reports a stowaway on a coaster. You have been cook too long to be surprised by hunger.

You do not shout. You set a covered pan of oats on the cold end of the range, stir in a spoon of treacle, and draw a neat line through the shortfall with the red pencil. Then, because the day has barely begun and the trunk on the brass figure is catching the lamplight, you write beneath it in small white letters: rice, Thursday, enough for two.