Black linework tattoo of a sitting cartoon elephant raising its trunk toward three outlined hearts, with pink and teal watercolour washes, on an upper arm.

Sketchy elephant with hearts on an upper arm

Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A sketchy cartoon elephant sits with its trunk raised towards three outlined hearts, with a small cross mark beside its body. The black linework has a hand-drawn, scribbled texture, and the figure is left mostly unshaded. Soft pink and teal watercolour-style washes spread behind the elephant and hearts, giving the composition a loose, painterly feel.

Upper arm Elephant Heart Cross Cartoon

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Right, settle down, the sausage rolls will keep. You lot have never heard how the Pemberton boy got his wedding back from the river. Stop fidgeting, Aunt Dot, you'll hear it same as everybody else. Old Mrs Ferrier kept a grey knitted elephant in her cardigan pocket, its left ear darned and a little cross stitched on its flank where she'd marked the place for a kiss. Nobody knew why it was grey when the whole village was pink and teal with dye from the mill. When the river came over Copper Lane the night before the wedding, that elephant was what the joiner found bobbing in the church porch, trunk lifted at the rafters as if it wanted to know the time.

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He was a sensible lad, and he didn't weep, though he came close. He tied three paper hearts to that trunk with garden string and wrote Nessa's name on the back of each one. Then he waded out to the vicarage shouting for the vicar, and the vicar shouted for the bells. By dawn the hearts were drifting down the lane on the brown water like a flotilla of postcards, and the whole village was out in wellies chasing them.

Here's the turn. Nessa didn't chase them. She stood on the footbridge where the water ran pink, reached down with both arms, and fished out all three. Her own handwriting was on every one, from the summer she'd posted them to him, and on the back of each she'd written the same four words: come and find me. So he did. The elephant had snagged on the bridge rail, and it looked on as if it had always known.

The wedding went ahead at two o'clock, in borrowed boots, and the elephant sat on the altar with its trunk raised toward the rafters. That's the sort of thing a grey wool elephant can do, when it's been loved properly. Now pass the trifle, and somebody fetch Dot's coat before she catches her death.