Ornamental elephant line drawing

The show was dying the way old circuses die, one wet town at a time. The big top had more patches than canvas, the lions had gone to a zoo in Kent, and the band played the same three waltzes because the trombonist had only ever learned three. Dolores was the last thing with any shine left. Old Sal Ennis, who mended the rigging, sat up with her every night with a pot of black ink and a steel nib. He didn't draw on her the way you'd draw on paper. He followed the grey creases of her hide like a river follows the land, and wherever the lines wanted to turn, he let them turn into triangles, dots, chevrons and bands of whatever her grandmother's people had carved on temple walls she'd never seen.

The manager came round in March with a man from Lincolnshire who wanted an elephant for a farm. The wages were owed, and the man had a cheque book and a cold way of looking at things. He walked around Dolores once, then again, and stopped at her ears, where Sal had worked until his fingers cramped. Nobody spoke for a long while. Then the man said he couldn't buy a creature that already looked like a cathedral, and he tore up his cheque in front of the manager and went home without his elephant.

They say the ink never wore off because she never stood still long enough for it to. Sal's nib is still wedged in its cork on the wagon step, and if you go to the old fairground at Skegness on a grey evening, you can still see her ears catching the last of the light, every line of her turning the way the river turns. Now. Who's for another log on that fire?