Two side-by-side photos of a fine line and shaded black and grey tattoo of two elephants touching trunks to form a heart, with script lettering beneath, on an ankle.

Two elephants with script on an ankle

Fine line · Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows two small elephants facing each other, with their raised trunks meeting to form a heart shape above them. Each elephant has soft grey shading and fine outlines, and a script line of text runs beneath them, reading differently in each of the two photographs. The left photo shows the tattoo with the script reading with love forever, and the right photo shows the same design with the script reading my pretty dancer, both on pale skin against a neutral background.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Walter Thewlis had lettered wagon panels for the Hollins Brothers Circus since the spring of 1911, and in all that time nobody had asked him for a line of verse. So when Mrs Hollins leaned over his trestle in Scarborough and said she wanted something on the side of the elephant wagon, he chewed his pencil and asked what it was to say.

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"Something for the two girls," she said. "Dolly and Bess. They've been trunk to trunk since they were calves."

He drew it first in grey wash, the two beasts facing each other, their trunks lifting until the tips met in a heart. Beneath them he lettered a looping line: with love forever. It was the sort of thing the ringmaster liked, sentimental and easy to read from the cheap seats. Walter tried a second version on a spare board, just to see how the words sat under the curve, and wrote my pretty dancer because Dolly had danced for him once, on a wet Tuesday, when the band was late.

The wagon went out on the Doncaster road that September with the first line gleaming on its flank. Bess was sold to a menagerie in Hamburg the following winter, and the panel was painted over with a lion tamer's name before the spring. Walter kept the spare board in his coat pocket and never quite explained to his wife why he carried it.

Every summer after that, when the circus pitched on the Scarborough sands, he walked down with the board under his arm and waited by the ropes. Dolly never came to the rail. But when the band struck up and he whistled the four notes she knew, the old cow lifted her trunk over the canvas and held it there, a heart in the air, until the keeper shouted her down.

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