Black and grey realistic tattoo of three elephants walking in a line with linked trunks, above script lettering, on the side of a person's ribs.

Three elephants and script on the ribs

Realism · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

Three elephants of decreasing size walk left to right in a row, with their trunks linked, above a line of cursive script that reads We love as a fam. The elephants are shaded in soft greys with fine detail on the skin folds and legs, while the script is solid black. The tattoo sits across the ribs on a close, side-on photo with a tattoo studio visible in the background.

Realism Lettering Ribs Elephant Script Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The Ruth Ellen tied up at Brixham at half five with her hold full of gurnard and the wind still shoving at the harbour wall. My uncle Tom counted the crew off the gangway like sheep through a gate, the way he had for thirty years, and when he got to me he put a hand on each of my shoulders and said, Last one's always the one who's lost. I was nineteen and had been sick twice that week. I didn't see the joke.

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The fleet was six boats that season, all painted the same grey-green, and they went out in a line because the skippers had agreed nobody would stray past the Start on their own. Tom's rule was simple. Keep the boat in front in sight, keep the boat behind in mind, and never let go of the ropes. The old women on the quay said the boats moved like a family crossing a river, one trailing the next, each steadying the stern of the other through the swell.

We lost the Teal in February. Not a sinking, just a radio that stopped answering and a long night of Tom at the wheel calling her name into the dark. At first light she came round the headland with a split bow and her crew waving tea towels from the wheelhouse, and Tom went to the rail without speaking and watched her come in, one hand flat on the cold metal, the way you'd check a sleeping child's breathing.

Years later I found his old oilskin in a cupboard. Sewn inside the collar, in biro on a strip of tape, in his cramped capitals, was the phrase he used to say whenever the fog came down: we love as a fam. I stitched the tape back in and left it where it was.