Geometric outlined elephants in blue, orange and pink watercolour wash on the ankle, with a smaller elephant beside a larger one.

Geometric elephants on an ankle

Geometric · Ankle · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows two elephants built from angular, faceted black outlines, one large and one small, walking side by side. The linework is solid and uniform, and the interiors carry loose watercolour-style washes of blue, orange, yellow and pink that bleed past the outlines in places. The design sits on the ankle and is photographed straight on against plain pale skin.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The paper elephants had been folded for three days before anyone thought to ask why the small one kept trying to walk backwards. Mirela, who ran the stall at the end of the Thursday market in Margate, said it was because the little one had been made from the corner of an old railway timetable, and timetables only ever run one way. Her father had taught her to fold with the printed side inward so the ink would not show through, and she had done the same for the larger elephant, which came from a page of tide tables.

Keep reading

The man who bought them was called Owen Perrin, and he came back the next Thursday with a question about the washes. He wanted the colour to look like it had soaked through, not been painted on. Mirela told him to dip the folds in weak tea and then in water with a drop of ink, and to let the paper drink slowly. He laughed and said his daughter would like that, and then he admitted she was seven and had lost her own small elephant on the sea wall.

Mirela wrapped the pair in tissue that week and sent them north by post with a note in the old railway hand: walk slowly, the tide is coming in. When the parcel came back a month later, unopened, with a sticker from the wrong station, she found the tissue still folded and the little elephant turned to face the big one, as if it had finally decided which way to go.

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