Black outline elephant tattoo with blue, purple and green patterned body and raised trunk holding a leafy sprig, on the side of the ribs.

Patterned elephant with raised trunk on ribs

Botanical · Ribs · Mixed · Photo

A black-outlined elephant walks along the side of the ribcage, its trunk raised to hold a small sprig of flowers and leaves. The body is filled with ornamental bands and scrolls, with blue and purple zigzags on the back and blue cuffs at the feet, plus green leaves in the scrollwork. The linework is clean and even, and the colour is applied in small accents against the black and skin tones.

Botanical Ribs Elephant Trunk Flower Leaves Sprig Ornamental pattern Scrollwork Zigzag

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The painter's men had finished the dado rail a week before the Mayor's ball, but the elephant on the end wall still wasn't right. Mr Dunmore wanted her plain grey, the colour of the coal barges, and he told me so from the top of his ladder. I wanted the patterns from the calico bolts my mother kept in the back room: bands of blue and plum zigzagging across her back, cuffs at her feet like the bangles on a dancer's wrist, a green vine scrolling down each leg.

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She was not walking anywhere in particular. She was lifting her trunk to a sprig of blossom, three buds and a few leaves, because the hall had no trees near enough to bring her anything real. I painted the flowers last, on a Thursday, while the tea dance went on below and the band thumped through a foxtrot so loudly that flakes of old distemper jumped off the cornice. Nobody came up to watch. That suited me. I had a habit then of talking to pictures when the piano was closed.

The fire in March blackened the ceiling, but the end wall came through untouched, which Mr Dunmore called a miracle and my mother called the elephant minding her own business. On the last night before the demolition men arrived, I climbed up with a rag and a jar of turpentine to clean the glass over her, and found the sprig had been touched up. Three buds had become four, a small green one tucked behind the others in pencil-fine strokes. I never learned who did it. Mr Dunmore swore he had been in Scarborough all that week.

I took the panel home rolled in a sheet of lino. It hangs above my piano now, and the newest bud is still the brightest green in the room.