Bold black lettering on a forearm, with the letters forming an elephant shape beneath the word.

Lettering with elephant shape on forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a black ink tattoo on the inner forearm or wrist, showing stylised lettering that appears to read Lepan. The lower strokes of the letters are shaped to suggest an elephant's body and legs. The ink is solid black with no shading, set against pale skin and a grey carpeted background.

Lettering Forearm Lettering Elephant Word Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Corin Asheby had painted every shopfront board in Marrowdene for thirty years, and nobody had ever asked him to make a word walk. The request came from Hester Vane, who wintered her travelling fair in the old mill yard and wanted her elephant's name on the side of the caravan before the spring fairs opened. "Lepan," she said, spelling it twice, as though he might mishear the sound of a bell.

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He tried the proper way first. Block capitals, then a looping copperplate that the damp had softened by Tuesday. Each night he sat with the brush across his knees and listened to the animal breathing through the barn wall, a slow sound like a bellows worked by someone very patient. On the fourth night he stopped fighting the letters. He let the L curl down into a foreleg, let the p sag into a belly, and bent the final n until it lifted a trunk.

Hester studied the board for a long while without speaking. Then she led him to the barn, where Lepan stood with her great grey head lowered, and the animal stepped forward and pressed her forehead against the wet paint. When she lifted away, a grey smear lay across the second letter, a print the size of a dinner plate. Hester laughed, a short bark of surprise, and said that settled it. The word was finished.

In the morning the caravan rolled out past the mill with its name standing on four legs along the panel. Corin stayed behind to clean his brushes. On the bench, where he had left them the night before, sat a paper bag of sugar cubes and a folded note in Hester's loose hand: Keep the lettering the way it is. Everyone on the road will know what it says.