Grey shaded elephant tattoo standing on its hind legs with its trunk raised, on the side of a torso above the hip.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Rearing elephant tattoo on the ribs

Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A shaded illustration of an elephant rearing up on its hind legs with its trunk raised high, running up the side of the torso. The linework is fine and the grey shading gives the skin and ears some depth and texture. The ink is almost entirely grey and dark, set against pale skin with a dark garment at the edges of the frame.

Ribs Elephant Animal Trunk

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The elephant would not come down the ramp until somebody sang to her, and nobody in the Cross Keys yard knew the words, so Mrs Pell sent me up to the loft for the tin whistle my father had left in a drawer full of harness buckles. The snow had shut the pass three days earlier. The menagerie wagons stood in a row against the stable wall, their canvas sagging white, and Bathsheba stood among them with her ears grey as wet slate and her eyes fixed on the rafters.

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I played a reel, badly, with my breath going out in clouds. The keeper, Amos Quirk, stood with his back to the door and said the beast had been shut in a box since Carlisle and was only stretching her legs. She did not stretch. She rose up on her hind legs the way the painted beasts did on the fairground posters, slowly, as though the stable roof were a thing she could lift off with her head, and her trunk went up and up until its tip touched the iron hook where the lantern used to hang.

Nobody moved. Through the gap in the slates a thin white thread of snow came down onto the straw, and she stood there in it, swaying a little, reaching for something she could not have named. Amos said afterwards that she wanted the lamp. Mrs Pell said she wanted her supper. I think she only wanted to see how high she could get before the weight of the winter brought her down.

In the morning the sky over the pass was clear and blue as a plate. She came down the ramp the way she had gone up, one foot after another, and at the taproom window the frost had grown into the shape of a raised trunk, curled at the end like a question nobody had asked.