Two mirrored elephant tattoos with black outlines and teal, purple and blue watercolour wash, placed on the tops of a pair of feet.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Matching watercolour elephants on feet

Fine line · Other · Mixed · Photo

Two mirrored elephants face each other across the centre of the image, each drawn in a simple black outline with a raised trunk and a curled tail. The linework is fine and clean, with soft teal, lilac and blue watercolour washes and splashes filling the bodies and spreading around them. The pale skin and painted blue toenails at the bottom of the frame give a sense of scale, and the design is centred evenly across both feet.

Fine line Other Elephant Matching pair Watercolour splash

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Ray,

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The lift is out again, so I have been counting stairs, which is how I came to notice the elephants. Someone has painted them on the wall of the bin store at the foot of Kestrel House, two of them, facing each other across the crack in the render where the old drainpipe used to be. Black outlines, very neat, trunks up in the air as if they are hailing a bus. Then somebody has gone over them with washes of teal and lilac, runny, as though the rain got to them before the paint dried.

Mrs Okafor on the fourth floor says a lad called Tomasz did them the summer before last, with tins his dad brought back from a decorating job in Rotherham. He was nine. He asked her if elephants could be twins, and she said they could if they liked each other enough, and he said these two liked each other enough. So he drew them mirrored, one turned towards the other.

He moved to Leeds in March. Nobody told the council about the elephants, so they are still there, and the council have not painted over them, which I put down to the fact that nobody has ever loved the bin store enough to bother.

Yesterday I stood in front of them with my shopping bags and tried to work out which one was the original. I could not. Left and right were the same creature, only turned round, the way you and I looked in the hall mirror when we were small. Then a woman came out with a pram, stopped, and said, "They're always touching noses in the rain." I looked, and in the wet the lilac from one ran straight into the teal of the other, and the trunks did meet, just at the crack.

Love, Joan