Black and grey tattoo of an elephant on long, spindly legs across the upper back of a woman seen from behind.

Surreal elephant on upper back

Back · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey elephant with a patterned saddle cloth sits high on the upper back, with its head turned to the right and its trunk curled downward. Its four legs are drawn as long, thin, wavering lines that stretch down towards the lower back, giving a dreamlike, surreal effect. Soft grey shading defines the body, while the legs are rendered in bold, dark outline.

Back Elephant Trunk Animal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The elephant came up the shingle on the fourth morning of the fog, walking on legs as long and thin as fishing rods, and Mrs Pardoe, who kept the boarding house at the top of Gull Row, said she had seen stranger things come in on the tide. She did not put it out. She put the kettle on instead. Its saddle cloth was red and cream, woven in a pattern like a staircase going up and never arriving, and its trunk curled down towards the step as if it had dropped something and was too polite to say so.

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The lodgers took it in their stride, or pretended to. Mr Ansell, a retired schoolmaster with a bad chest, insisted it was the mist playing tricks and went out to prove it, then came back and asked for a second boiled egg. Hester, who was twelve and had come down from Leeds with a cardboard suitcase, fed it crusts through the parlour window. There was no room upstairs with a ceiling high enough for those legs, so the elephant stood all night among the aspidistras, knees bent like a heron's, breathing slowly.

Each morning it stood a little taller. Hester noticed first that the fog had thinned by a hand's width each day, as if the elephant were drawing it off the sea and folding it away. On the sixth day Mr Ansell read aloud from the local paper an old notice about a travelling fair that had gone under in the harbour the summer his grandfather was a boy, and about an elephant that had swum home alone. Nobody said anything for a while. The kettle sang.

On the seventh day the fog lifted clean away and the parlour was empty except for the smell of wet straw. The saddle cloth lay folded on the newel post, salt-stiff and still warm. Down on the shingle, a line of long, wavering prints ran straight into the grey water, and the tide was already coming in to take them.