Black and grey tattoo of an adult elephant and a smaller elephant walking side by side along the ribs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two elephants walking along the ribs

Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows an adult elephant with a smaller elephant following behind, both in profile and walking to the right. The outlines are dark and the bodies are filled with soft grey shading, with some darker detail on the legs and trunks. The subjects sit in a horizontal band across the side of the torso, with the rest of the skin and a light grey top filling the frame.

Ribs Elephant Calf Animal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Right, sit down, the lot of you. The urn's only just boiled and Mr Pargeter has been eyeing the biscuits since the hall doors opened. You all think you remember me as the dinner lady with the ladle. I'll tell you about the elephants instead, because it was the elephants that kept Hollins Road Primary standing the year the boiler went.

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Back then the travelling circus pitched on the rec behind the gasworks, and Dolly Marsh, who had a trunk like a fallen oak, was the big grey cow they kept for the parade. She had a calf that year, a skinny thing called Pip who wouldn't go anywhere without his mother's tail in his trunk. Every morning he trundled after her down Grange Lane, past the chip shop and the chapel, and every morning the lollipop lady stopped the traffic for them the way she'd never once stopped for a bus.

Then the circus packed up one wet Tuesday and went north without a word, and Pip was left behind in a hired field with nobody to follow. Nobody in the village had the heart to tell the children. So for three weeks the whole school walked the calf to his lessons, one of us on each flank, and he learned our names faster than we learned our times tables.

On the last day of term, Pip stopped at the school gate, looked back down the lane, and lifted his trunk the way Dolly used to. I can still see the gap in the hedge where he went through. Now, who's got the last custard cream?