Small black fine line elephant tattoo on the ankle, with a patterned fill across its back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small elephant tattoo on an ankle

Fine line · Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

A small elephant is tattooed on the outer side of a person's ankle, facing right with its trunk curled up. The linework is thin and the back and head are filled with a dense, ornamental pattern of dots and marks. The ink is black on pale skin, set against a light sofa-like fabric and a grey-green floor.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The elephant had been whittled from the broken end of a tiller, and Nell Harrow kept it in the breast pocket of her oilskin for the whole of the Bay crossing, because her brother had told her a thing carried against the body would not go over the side in a squall.

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Sam had cut it on the long watch out of Madras with a sheath knife and a stub of pencil. He had not bothered with the ears or the short stumpy legs, but he had spent an entire evening on the back, scoring it with a nail point into a dense crosshatch of dots, the way the painted cloths were worked for the beasts that carried men up the hill roads. "So it looks dressed for a journey," he said, turning it so the lamp caught the marks. The mate bellowed for the topsail, and Sam went up the ratlines in the dark and did not come down the same way.

Nell had the elephant out on the rail at Liverpool, where the wind came straight off the Mersey and rattled the cargo nets. Tar had crept into every dot, so the back looked like a field of tiny black seeds. She had meant to throw it in the water, the way the other hands did with their keepsakes, but the dock was loud with carts and gulls, and she could not make her wrist do it.

Instead she turned the little figure so its trunk curled up toward the ship, the way Sam had carved it, as if it were waving at the men still aboard. Then she tucked it back in her pocket and walked up the quay towards the lodging houses, one hand pressed flat against her coat.

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