Black tribal-style elephant tattoo with its trunk raised, placed on the upper arm of a person in a white top.

Tribal elephant on an upper arm

Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A black ink tattoo of an elephant with its trunk curled upwards, built from bold tribal-style curves, solid shapes and dotted details. The linework is crisp and the shading is solid black with no greys, set against lightly lit skin. The design fills the upper arm and shoulder area, with the elephant's body angled diagonally across the skin.

Upper arm Elephant

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The carter's boy had been sent up to Harrowell Keep with a cart of salt herring, and the gate-warden told him the only thing left inside the walls was the elephant. Nobody had seen it move for a hundred years. It was carved in black stone above the well, trunk raised as if to trumpet at the sky, and the dots cut into its flanks were said to be the eyes of the keep's dead.

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The boy did not believe it. He drew water in the rain while the warden grumbled over the tally, and when the bucket came up he saw the trunk had curled tighter, the way a sleeper's hand closes. He told no one. He emptied the herring into the cellar, counted the barrels twice, and came back to the well at dusk with a lantern and a cup of milk, because his grandmother had told him that anything carved this old was hungry for something ordinary.

The elephant was waiting for him in the courtyard with its back to the moon. It bent one foreleg as though to kneel, and the lantern light slid across the dots along its shoulder like beads of spilt rain. The boy set the milk down. The trunk came down slow and lifted the cup, and when it was empty the beast wiped its own mouth on the wall and went still.

In the morning the cup sat on the well's rim, full again, though the milk had gone to salt. The warden swore the keep had always been empty. The carter's boy drove his cart home the long way, past the ruin, and never once looked up at the stone.