Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Simple line drawing of an elephant

Black and grey · Flash

A single black outline drawing of a standing elephant facing right, with its trunk curled and a small eye marked. The line weight is even and the drawing has no shading or fill. The elephant sits centred on a plain white background with generous empty space around it.

Elephant Animal Outline

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The abbot found the elephant on the third morning of Lent, tucked inside the back board of the psalter I was copying, and he carried it to the window as though the bishop might have sent it to test us. I had drawn it without lifting the pen. One line ran from the hind foot, over the ridge of the back, down the trunk and round again to where it began, so the beast was a single thought rather than a collection of parts. I had seen a real one only once, the summer the travelling fair came up the Wenlock road with its painted wagons and a grey animal that stood in the mud as patiently as Brother Hugh at vespers.

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"This is not in the Rule, Brother Edmund," he said. I told him nothing in the Rule forbade elephants, only vanity, and I was not sure which this was. He asked whether the creature had been in the fair for profit or for the sinful pleasure of the crowd. I said it had been there for pennies, and that the boy who led it had fed it a heel of bread he had been meant to sell, and that the animal had bowed its head to him when he took the coin back.

The abbot said nothing for a long while. Then he sat down heavily on the bench where the ink jars stood and ran his thumb along the line of the back, slowly, as if feeling for a seam. "You never lifted the pen," he said. I said I had not. He gave the drawing back to me and told me to finish the psalm I was on.

That evening I found the elephant pasted neatly into the margin of the page beside the Miserere, ruled round in red, with a few words underneath in the abbot's small hand: for the boy with the loaf.