Solid black tattoo of an Om symbol combined with an elephant head shape, shown in bold brush-like linework on the upper arm.

Om symbol with elephant head on upper arm

Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A bold black tattoo of the Om symbol, with its curves forming a stylised elephant head that has a small eye and a trunk curling into a spiral. The linework is thick and smooth with tapered strokes, and the design is filled with solid black ink on lightly tanned skin. It is centred in a close crop with a plain background.

Upper arm Om Elephant Symbol Spiral Trunk

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Tomasz, you will laugh, but I have spent the whole of this week in a war with a brass elephant. The 9.40 was already breathing on Platform Four when Mrs Ellery came hurrying back for the small bell she had left under the bench, and I had to tell her I had sent it on to lost property at Crewe. You will say I should have kept it in the booking office. I know. But it was the old kind of bell, with a trunk curled up like a fern and a little Om cut into its belly, and it had a way of making the whole concourse go quiet when you lifted it.

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She told me, while the guard was walking the length of the train with his whistle in his mouth, that her husband had bought it at a market in Pune the summer before he went to sea. He had hummed the sound it made for her over cups of stewed tea in the buffet, badly, she said, and told her it was the noise the world makes before anybody has decided what to say. She has not heard him hum since the spring. She wanted only to hold the thing for the length of the journey to Leeds, and I had made her miss the train by standing there thinking about rules.

So after the last carriage had gone I took the key to the cage and went down among the umbrellas and the single gloves. The bell was wrapped in a tea towel at the back, under a box of tangled Christmas lights. I did not mean to ring it in the empty station, but I did, once, and the note went out under the iron roof like a thread drawn through cloth, and it came back to me off the cold tiles of the footbridge.

I wrote the name and the platform on the label in my neatest hand and put it on the counter for the morning. Then I stayed a while longer, because I had the feeling, which you will also laugh at, that somewhere on the line a woman with her hand flat against a train window had heard it too. Yours, Nell.