Black and grey tattoo of three ornately patterned elephants walking in a line, with trunks linked, across the upper back.

Three patterned elephants walking across a back

Back · Black and grey · Photo

Three elephants walk left to right in a line, the largest at the left and the smallest in the middle, with their trunks joined. Each body is filled with mandala-like patterns of dots, scallops and triangles, drawn in fine, even outlines with light grey shading. The ink is black and grey, and the design sits horizontally across the upper back with plenty of skin around it.

Back Elephant Pattern Ornament Trunk

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain had been falling on Halvar Lane since before the lamps were lit, and Mrs Oduya was still at her indigo vats when the youngest of the cloth elephants went missing from the drying line. Her apprentice, Tamsin, swore she had pegged all three by their trunks that morning, the great grey one at the front, the small one in the middle, and the mother at the back with the dots running down her flanks like rows of stitched beads. Now only two hung there, their trunks reaching for an empty peg.

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They found the calf at the river steps, where the water had begun to rise and the cloth had snagged on a broken oar. It stood there patient and dripping, its painted scallops darkened to the colour of wet slate. Tamsin tried to lift it, but the fabric tore at the corner and she sat down on the wet stone, furious and close to tears. The old dyer came down slowly, her knees complaining, and said nothing at all. She only took the mother cloth from her shoulder and laid its trunk gently against the calf's, the way the pattern had always shown them walking.

By the time the lamps were lit again, the three of them were back on the line, joined trunk to trunk and turning slowly in the warm air from the vats. Mrs Oduya wrung the river out of the little one's hem and pegged it in the middle, where it belonged. Tamsin noticed, for the first time, that the dots on each back were arranged in the same count, one for every step the family had walked from the ferry to the lane, and that the calf had been counting too.