Black and grey realism tattoo of the Hindu deity Ganesha with an ornate headdress and script on the trunk, across the back of a hand.

Ganesha tattoo on the back of a hand

Realism · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A hand holding two black pencils shows a large tattoo of the Hindu deity Ganesha, with an ornate headdress of scrolling and medallion patterns above the elephant head. The face and trunk are rendered in fine shading with smooth grey gradations, and the trunk carries a column of script. The image is in black and grey, with a blurred background and a soft white backdrop.

Realism Hand Ganesha Elephant Ornament Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The Mary Ellen had been listing to starboard since the spring floods, and Pell Hale paid me in tea and the use of the back cabin to write letters for the lock-keepers and the widows up and down the cut. I kept my pencils in a tobacco tin and a small brass god on the shelf above the stove, a gift from a lock-keeper's wife who said he was good with paperwork. He had the ears of a man who listened and no patience at all for nonsense, and a column of tiny script ran down his trunk that I had never been able to read.

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The girl came aboard at dusk with a solicitor's envelope and a face like she had been crying in the rain on purpose. She wanted a reply to a notice that would move her father's moorings off the bend by the mill, and she wanted it by Tuesday. I asked her what she meant to say. She told me the notice was wrong, the water was theirs, the forms were a lie, and then she stopped and looked at the stove for a long time. 'Write that I'm sorry,' she said. 'Write that I'm not sure I want to fight for a boat that won't float.'

I wrote it down exactly as she said it, though it was not the letter she had come for. My pencil kept breaking, so I sharpened it four times, and each time the point came out clean on the first stroke, which my mother would have called a sign and I call luck. When I read it back to her she nodded slowly and asked me to fold it small enough to fit in her coat pocket.

She left the letter for the solicitor and the moorings for her father, who could sort out his own mess. In the morning the Mary Ellen had settled level in the mud, and the brass god had moved to the windowsill facing the water, his trunk curled around my spare pencil as if he meant to keep it.