Red scribbled-line tattoo of an elephant on a man's chest, with silhouetted birds rising from its back on trailing lines, beside a colour lotus tattoo.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Red sketched elephant and birds on chest

Chest · Colour · Photo

A red tattoo of an elephant drawn in loose, scratchy linework covers much of the chest, with its body shaded by dense hatching. Several solid red bird silhouettes rise from the elephant's back, each connected to it by a thin trailing line. A colour lotus flower sits at the upper left and a multicoloured geometric tattoo is visible on the right arm, with the photo taken in even indoor light.

Chest Elephant Bird Line Lotus

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Tomasz, the elephant came off the lorry at Hunslet at two in the morning, and I have been awake since trying to decide whether you would have laughed or cried at the sight of her. The yard lamps were the colour of weak tea, and the rain had turned the cobbles to something like oil. Mr Pryce wanted her walked straight into the old goods shed before anyone from the council saw, so I took the rope, and she followed me the way a tired dog follows a coat.

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She is not sick, only old, and she carries her head low as if the city weighs on it. The starlings found her before I did. By the time I had the shed doors chained there were forty of them on the rafters, and when she lifted her trunk they went up in one black sheet and came down again on her back, shuffling, combing the rain out of her hide with their feet. I thought of the sketchbooks you kept above the bench in Lodz, all those scratched lines you drew to stop your hands from shaking.

Here is the thing I have not told anyone. When the bell at St Saviour's struck four, she stood perfectly still, and the birds lifted together, pulled off her spine by threads I could almost see in the lamplight. They rose over the gantry and scattered towards the river. She did not follow them. She only breathed out, long and slow, the way Mother used to before she sang.

The lorry driver wants paying on Friday. Pryce says she goes on to Leeds in a fortnight. I have started keeping the ends of my wages in a biscuit tin under the bench, and every dusk the starlings come back to sit on the shed roof, waiting for her to be ready. Write soon and tell me if the river still freezes below the bridge. Your brother, Kasimir.