Black outline tattoo of two elephants touching trunks with a small red heart, above Roman numerals, on the lower leg.

Two elephants with red heart on a limb

Fine line · Other · Mixed · Photo

Two elephants in black outline face right, the smaller one at left with its trunk meeting the larger one's trunk. A small red heart sits between them, and the Roman numerals XVII . XI . MMXIII run beneath. The linework is clean and uniform with no shading, and the photo is taken straight on against white bedding.

Fine line Other Elephant Heart Roman numeral Outline

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit yourselves down by the range and mind the coal scuttle, because this is a story my grandfather only told on the night shift, when the pit was quiet and there was nothing to do but listen. Up on Ashgrove Row there was a blacksmith called Eli Dunmore who kept an old circus cow in his back field after the travelling show went bust at Whitsun. Her name was Bessie, though the children called her Duchess, and she had a trunk that could lift a sack of slack clean off a cart.

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The winter her calf came, the stable at Dunmore's was so cold the breath hung in the air like washing. The calf was small enough to stand under her belly, and the first thing it did, before it had found its legs, was reach out and wrap its trunk round hers. Eli said he had never seen a thing so keen to hold on. The children scratched the pair of them onto the chapel wall with a bit of slate, and the vicar, who had no sense of humour, let it stay until the damp took it.

Then the roof came in at the low seam and nine men were left under Ashgrove. The women stood at the pithead in their shawls, and it was the calf who got loose that morning, trumpeting down the lane until the whole village turned out after it. Bessie came behind, slow and heavy, and walked straight to the shaft gate, where she stood with her trunk raised and made a sound nobody in Ashgrove had heard before or has heard since. Seven men came up that afternoon and the other two by dark. Nobody ever said the elephants had done it, though nobody ever said they hadn't.

The calf lived to be forty. Every November, on the day the wagons first came up the valley, Eli's widow walked out to the field with an apple for each of them, and the calf, grey as ash by then, would curl its trunk around hers and wait for her to take the first bite.