Close-up of a fine line tattoo of two small elephants facing each other on a woman's shoulder, with fingers touching the design.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two elephants on a shoulder

Fine line · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

Two small elephants face each other in thin black outline, with their trunks curling towards one another and a small heart-like shape beneath them. The linework is fine and even, with no shading or colour fill. The tattoo sits near the top of the shoulder, with a finger resting beside it and a soft, blurred background of a wall and framed picture.

Fine line Shoulder Elephant Heart

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The wall between the Pells' orchard and the Garrods' had been down for three summers, and still nobody would be the first to pick up the stones. Ruth counted the Conference pears from her ladder and pretended not to hear the Garrod boy whistling on the far side of the damsons.

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On the last Saturday of August the wasps were drunk on windfalls and the air smelled of cider. A gust took the boy's ladder sideways. Ruth heard the crack before she saw him, a thin yelp, then boots running through long grass. Her own ladder was already moving towards the hedge before she had decided anything.

He was mostly fine, sitting in the grass with a split lip and a pear in each fist, insisting he had meant to drop them. Ruth knelt and pressed her thumb to the cut the way her mother had taught her. He looked at her as if she were something from the other side of a border. Between them lay a flat grey stone, the top course of the old wall, furred with moss.

They built it back that week, one stone each, passing them over the gap with hands that never quite touched. By October the wall was waist high and nobody mentioned the damsons. On the stone where they had first sat, the boy had scratched two small beasts with long curling noses, facing each other, and beneath them a heart. Ruth saw it every morning on her way to the press. She never once asked him to scrub it off.