Black and grey fine line tattoo of a small elephant outline on the side of a finger, photographed against a dark background.

Small elephant outline tattoo on a finger

Fine line · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A small elephant in profile, facing right, is drawn in a single thin black outline on the side of a finger. The linework is simple and unshaded, with the body, legs and trunk defined only by the contour. The image is black and white and the tattoo sits centrally on the finger against a plain dark background.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Piet had wiped the galley slate three times that morning, and three times the elephant came back up through the wet, facing forward the way the ship was going. Cook Hanne stood with her ladle dripping over the stockpot and said nothing for a long while, which was how she said most things.

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The boy had drawn it first off the Cape Verde islands, when the Harrow Mary lay becalmed for nine days and the biscuit began to smell of the hold. His grandmother in Hull had told him that any creature drawn without lifting the chalk could not be lost at sea, so long as the line was never broken. He made the beast from memory: a trunk like a question mark, four short legs, a back rounded with carrying. Nobody aboard had seen one. Hanne had seen one once, in a market, and said it was grey and patient and bigger than a wagon.

On the tenth night the fog came down so thick the bowsprit lantern gave no light at all. The mate ordered the bell rung, and nobody could tell which way was ahead. Piet crept into the galley, found the slate by feel, and drew the elephant again without lifting his hand, starting at the tail so the trunk pointed to the bow. He rubbed it out with his sleeve and drew it again. When the fog thinned at dawn, land showed as a grey smudge dead ahead, exactly where the elephant was looking.

Hanne still scrubs the slate each morning. Every morning the elephant returns, faint as breath, and she leaves it there, because a beast that knows the way home is good company in a galley.

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