Pencil drawing of an ornately patterned elephant raising its trunk to spray a decorative swirling design, shown as a tattoo flash on grey paper.

Ornate elephant spraying a swirl

Black and grey · Flash

A pencil drawing of an elephant with its trunk raised, spraying a stylised swirl of water or ornament upwards. The elephant's body and legs are covered in scrolls, dots and banded patterns, with shaded areas giving it volume. The drawing is in black and grey on a plain, muted grey background, with the subject placed centrally and the spray rising to the upper left.

Elephant Trunk Spray Swirl Ornament Pattern Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You reach the Sarkan pass a day ahead of the snow, and the muleteer, a silent man called Pell who has not spoken since the last river crossing, stops the mules beneath the elephant. It was cut into the rock long before the road, its trunk raised high, and the water that once poured from it has left a fan of stone scrolls and dots down the cliff face like a spill of ink. Pell crouches, sets down his lantern, and waits for you to ask the question he will not answer.

Keep reading

The herders tell it this way. The elephant belonged to a keeper's daughter called Oriel, who was promised to a salt merchant from the lowlands. On the night before the wedding she led the last beast of the caravan up the switchbacks, because it would not be sold and she would not be sold without it. At the summit the wind was so hard that the elephant could not lift its trunk to drink, so she sang to it until it stretched upward and blew a spray of melt water into the dark.

The merchant came after them at dawn with four men and a lamp. He found the girl sitting on the wall with her back to the drop and the elephant standing over her like a gate. Water was still falling from the trunk in a shining arch, freezing as it fell, and each drop caught on the rock as a small pale dot. He looked at it for a long time. Then he turned his horse around, and the herders say no one has been refused the road since.

Pell lifts the lantern now and shows you the last carving, low on the rock where the scrolls thin out. It is a girl's handprint, pressed into wet clay and hardened by frost. Then he gathers the reins, the mules lean into the wind, and you follow the swirl of stone up towards the snow.