Line drawing of an elephant with its trunk raised, built from purple, lavender and grey triangular facets, shown as a tattoo design on a plain white background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Geometric elephant design in purple

Geometric · Colour · Flash

A side-profile elephant with its trunk raised, filled with overlapping triangular facets. The outlines are dark and fine, and each facet carries a soft watercolour wash in lilac, violet and grey. The elephant sits centred on a plain white background with no other elements.

Geometric Elephant Triangle Facet Trunk

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody believes me, so sit nearer, and mind the stove, it bites. The elephant came up the Trent the spring the glassworks flooded, when the river stood higher than the towpath and every shed along Hollin Lane had its feet in the water. It wasn't a beast to begin with. It was a heap of shards, lilac and violet and that grey you get off wet slate, washed out of a chapel window nobody had money to mend.

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My grandfather Alf was working the Rosalind that night, tied up against the lock gate with a lantern and a bottle of gin he thought nobody knew about. He heard the glass before he saw anything. It sounded like a hundred cups being set down very carefully, all at once. Then the shards began lifting out of the brown water, sliding together edge to edge, until a long triangled trunk rose up over the reeds and stopped, and the whole thing turned its head towards him as if it wanted to know the time.

He swore it trumpeted. The lock keeper swore it didn't, but the lock keeper was asleep. Whatever sound it made shook the bell rope on the barge loose, and the bell rang on its own for a full minute. Alf said the elephant bowed to the bell, lowered that great jagged head, and then walked off along the bank in the rain, every step a small bright chime.

In the morning the reeds were empty and the chapel window was whole again, though the lead lines on it had gone a little crooked. If you ever go past, look at the grey panel by the door. There's a faint shape of a foot in the corner that wasn't there before. Alf always said the elephant had only borrowed the glass, and it was still walking home.