Black and grey tattoo of three patterned elephants walking in a line across the forearm, each filled with paisley and mandala detail.

Three ornate elephants on a forearm

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Three elephants of decreasing size walk in a row across the forearm, trunks linked to the one in front. Each body is filled with dense paisley, mandala and scroll patterns, with fine linework outlining the shapes. The tattoo is in black and grey ink against a plain, warmly lit background of skin and a pink towel.

Forearm Elephant Mandala Paisley Pattern Scroll

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The signal at Halsey Junction had been stuck on red since six, and Walter Pike had run out of things to say to the pigeons. He leaned on the lamp post by the goods shed and watched the lane beyond the yard, where a woman in a faded green coat was leading three elephants towards the station. Each animal had its trunk curled round the tail of the one ahead, and their great grey flanks were stitched over with paisley and scrolls that the dusk seemed to pick out one loop at a time.

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"Our wagon went on the wrong line at Ferndale," the woman said, when she reached the platform edge. Her name was Dorothy Lund and she had the flat, patient voice of someone who had argued with stationmasters across half of England. "Can you find us a siding before the next lot of coal comes through?" Walter could, though it meant moving a milk churn and two men's bicycles, and by the time he had done it the sky had gone the colour of wet slate.

The youngest elephant balked at the ramp. It planted its feet and swung its head, and Dorothy hummed something low until it stepped up after the others. Walter found himself humming too, a tune his mother used to sing over the mangle, and the elephants seemed to settle at the sound. When the doors slid shut, a grey tip of trunk poked out through the gap, feeling along the wooden slats for the tail of the one inside.

The signal dropped with a clank. Walter pulled the lever on the siding, and the wagon rolled out into the dark with its small passengers still linked, one to the next, like words in a sentence nobody had finished.