Black and grey traditional flash of an elephant with its trunk raised, shown with a flower and leaves below, drawn on white card against a dark background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Traditional elephant flash with flower

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

A traditional style design of an elephant with its trunk raised, curled tusks and a small eye, with a five-petalled flower and a branch of pointed leaves at the lower right. The elephant is outlined in bold black with grey shading along the trunk, head and body, and the leaves use dark tones with white highlights. The design is shown in black and grey on white card, centred on a dark background.

Traditional Elephant Tusk Trunk Flower Leaves Branch

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Ilse, the ship has been at anchor off Berenike for nine days now and the sea turns the colour of pewter every morning, so I have stopped expecting it to change. Tell Father the beast is well. Her name is Nilla, though the purser insists on calling her the Queen of the Hold, and she eats more fodder than the whole garrison. I walk her along the sand each dawn on a rope she could snap if she cared to.

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Yesterday the wind dropped and the men began quarrelling over dice. Nilla stood at the rail with her trunk raised high, curling it the way she does when she smells rain on the far hills, though there was none. Then she reached down toward the shore, where a boy from the salt works had come to sell us bread. He held up a branch of myrtle he had been cutting for his mother's grave. Nilla took it gently, stripped the leaves one by one with her lips, and dropped the last flower at my feet.

I have kept that flower pressed in my logbook between the tide tables. I do not know what a myrtle bloom is supposed to do in the middle of a voyage that has another month to run south. When the boy came back in the evening, I gave him a copper coin and told him the elephant had asked for him by name. He laughed as if I had made a fine joke.

Write again soon. Tell Mother I am eating properly, and that the dates here are better than hers, though I would never say so to her face.

Your brother, Teodor