Realism style grey tattoo of a seated baby elephant with its trunk raised, with small coloured butterflies above, on the side of the torso.

Seated baby elephant with butterflies on the side

Realism · Ribs · Mixed · Photo

A seated baby elephant with its trunk raised and ears folded back is shown in grey shading, with soft gradients on the skin and wrinkles. Above the elephant, a trail of small butterflies in blue, purple and green rises with tiny dots of coloured sparkle. The composition is centred on the elephant against a plain skin background, with the butterflies adding the only colour.

Realism Ribs Elephant Butterfly Sparkle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The calf turned up in the plum orchard on the last Saturday of August, sitting in the windfalls the way a dog sits when it has been told to wait. Gran said nobody had told it anything. She put the bucket down and walked the long way round the trees, which was how she approached anything she didn't trust.

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It raised its trunk as we came close, slow as a crane, and out of the curl came a thin stream of butterflies. Blue ones, purple ones, and a green one with a torn wing that kept dropping behind. Where they rose they shed a dust that caught the low sun and hung in the air like grit from a glitter jar. I said it was sneezing. Gran said it was calling somebody, and that the somebody had been gone a long time.

We found a name stitched on a canvas strap caught in the hedge, belonging to a travelling fair that had packed up in June and left the fields behind the church. Gran rang the number on the strap. Nobody answered, so we sat with the calf instead, on the warm windfalls, while the butterflies went up one by one through the branches, each one tilting at the top as if reading a map. The calf watched them go with its small grey eyes and did not follow.

By dusk there were only specks left, drifting over the wall as if someone had shaken out a sieve. The calf folded its ears back and rested its head on its knees. When I wiped my palms on my shorts they came away gold-flecked, and I kept them that way for days, not washing them, the way you keep a promise you have not yet made to anyone.