Small fine line outline tattoo of two elephants with their trunks touching, placed on the side of the ribs.

Two elephants touching trunks on the ribs

Fine line · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows two simple outline elephants facing each other, with their trunks meeting in the centre. The thin, even single-line linework is in dark ink with no shading or fill. The small design sits on the side of the ribs against plain skin, with a red lace garment edge visible at the bottom of the frame.

Fine line Ribs Elephant Trunk Outline

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The brass had gone tacky with the damp again, and Mabel Crane was working polish into the lamp room rail when the supply boat's horn faltered somewhere past the skerry. Her brother Tom had carved two elephants into the lintel above the store door the summer before he left for the mainland. Their trunks curled towards each other in the middle, so the lintel looked like a pair of brackets holding the door up. She had asked him once why elephants, out here on a rock off the Pentland Firth, and he had shrugged and said they looked after one another. She had thought it a daft answer.

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The light had to be lit before the cloud came down. Her father's ledger lay open on the desk below, its columns of dates in his cramped hand, and the last entry read only: Lamp stuck, oil low, mind the second flue. Mabel climbed the iron stairs with the wick trimmers in her apron pocket, counting the steps as she always did, and found the mechanism stiff but willing. By the time the mantle caught, the sea had gone the colour of slate and rain was rattling the glass.

She swept the beam out over the water. Far off, where the mainland dropped into darkness, a small yellow light flickered twice, then steadied. A moment later another answered from the jetty at the bottom of the bay, and she knew the boat was not late after all, only carrying someone who had decided to come home.

She went down, opened the ledger and wrote: Lit at dusk. Two lights seen. Then, after a while, she added that the lintel was to stay exactly as it was.