Black and grey sleeve tattoo on an upper arm and forearm, featuring a sunflower, a rose, a lotus and an ornate elephant head with mandala detailing.

Sunflower, rose and elephant arm sleeve

Botanical · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A sleeve tattoo runs from the upper arm down the forearm, with a large sunflower, a shaded rose and a lotus near the top. At the lower end, an elephant head sits within an ornate mandala-style frame with fine dotted and scrolled detailing. The work uses black and grey ink with soft shading on the petals and rose, and the arm is photographed against a white textured blanket.

Botanical Upper arm Forearm Sunflower Rose Lotus Elephant Mandala Sleeve

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The river was so low that autumn that the boatwoman, Hester Wane, could walk the shallows beside her barge, and she did, leading the elephant on a rope of plaited hemp. The beast had come up the Humber on a steamer nobody in Selby would name, and it had been left on the quay with a debt and a bad temper. Hester took it because the rope was cheap and the barge needed ballast.

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Each evening she tied up under the willows, and the elephant knelt in the mud as if praying, its ears pressed flat. Hester had seen the pattern on the carved lid of her grandmother's tea chest, a ring of lotus and sunflower and looping scroll, and she traced it on the damp wood with a burnt stick. The elephant watched her do it. When the moon came up over the mill, it lifted its trunk and drew the same ring in the air, slow and exact, the way a painter lays down a border.

Upriver, the lock keeper had a daughter who had not spoken since the spring flood took her brother. Hester brought the elephant to the lock at dusk. The girl came down the towpath in her nightdress, touched the grey hide, and began to count the dots on its forehead aloud, one, two, a hundred, until the water stopped moving under the gate and the sound of it stopped too.

In the morning the rain came back and the river rose a hand's breadth. Hester cast off with the elephant standing in the hold among the coal. Nobody ever asked where it went. The lock keeper's girl kept a sunflower painted on her door, and beneath the paint, in small careful dots, a ring of scrolls that the river seemed to know by heart.