Black ink elephant tattoo with a raised trunk and decorative patterned fills, placed on the side of the ribs.

Ornamental elephant on the ribs

Blackwork · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A standing elephant with its trunk raised sits on the side of the ribs, drawn in a bold black outline. The head, trunk and legs carry ornamental dot and scroll patterns, and the body is filled with a mandala-like leaf design. The image is a close, straight-on photograph of the skin in soft warm lighting, with only black ink visible.

Blackwork Ribs Elephant Mandala Ornament Floral pattern

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The elephant on the tiller bar had lost most of its paint somewhere between Stoke and Rugby, and Nell only noticed when her father tapped it with his pipe stem. Trunk raised, it had always looked to her like something calling a ship home. Now the dots had worn grey and the scrolls had softened to shadows, but the outline still held, black as a stove.

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Tom had carved it the winter she was born, from a length of ash that had come off a felled gate on the Oxford canal. He worked the leaf pattern on its flank with a bradawl, petal by petal, while frost furred the cabin window and the lock gates groaned somewhere below. He never explained the raised trunk. He only said an animal that is about to be lifted should at least be able to see where it is going.

When the Marigold went up for sale at Braunston, the buyer wanted the tiller fittings included. Nell unscrewed the elephant herself on the last morning, expecting dust. Underneath, on the pale wood, Tom had scratched a name in pencil so faint it had nearly rubbed away: Sal, who would not wait for the spring.

She stood on the lock beam with the carving in both hands. Below her the water was still and brown. She set the elephant down facing the water, trunk up, and left it there for the next boat to find.