Black and grey realism tattoo on a forearm of two adult elephants raising their trunks to form a heart, with a small calf standing between them.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two elephants and a calf on a forearm

Realism · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Two adult elephants face each other with their trunks curled upward to form a heart shape above a smaller calf standing centrally below. The linework is soft and the bodies are shaded in greys to give volume and texture. The black and grey palette is set against the skin, and the design is centred and sits horizontally along the forearm.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, sit down, and mind the stove, it spits when the wind gets round the chimney. You've come in from the rain wanting a story, so I'll give you the one about the winter the menagerie wintered in Skelby, and the two grey cows who had more sense than the men.

Keep reading

The travelling show came off the road in November with its wagons sunk to the axles, and the keeper, a man called Tobias Renn, put the elephants in a long shed behind the Crown. Nell and Hester, they were called, both old enough to remember the sea crossing. In January Hester went heavy, and by the first hard frost she was calving in straw so deep the lamp smoke hung over it like fog.

The calf came out small and wet and would not stand. Renn sat on an upturned bucket with his hands jammed in his coat and told his daughter, who was nine and crying, that crying would not get the thing up on its feet. Then Nell came round the partition, slow as a tide, and laid her trunk over Hester's back. Hester lifted hers. The two of them met above the straw and curled their ends together into a loop, and they held it there, a heart of grey skin in the lamplight, while the calf found its legs underneath.

Renn always said they were only making a door, to keep the draught off. Maybe so. The girl grew up and went to sea on a herring boat out of Lowestoft, and every time she came back into harbour she looked for that shape in the sky over the quay, two gulls turning to meet, and every time she laughed at herself for it. The calf never got a proper name. It was just the little one, walking in the middle.

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