Black ink tattoo of a large and a small elephant, both filled with mandala and flower patterns, on a area of skin that appears to be the back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two mandala elephants on the back

Blackwork · Back · Black and grey · Photo

Two elephants walk side by side, a larger one followed by a smaller one with its trunk curled toward the tail of the first. Both bodies are filled with fine black linework and ornamental patterns, including a central flower motif on the larger elephant. The design is shown in black and grey ink against pale skin, with the subject centred and the rest of the frame blank skin.

Blackwork Botanical Back Elephant Mandala Flower Pattern

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The fair came through Hetton in the strike year with two elephants and a man who swore they had walked from Bombay, though they looked as if they had been walking since the Boer War. Mam said we were not to look at them. We looked anyway, from the top of the wall by the Co-op, where the coal dust lay so thick on the sills you could write your name in it.

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The big one was called Bella, and the man said the patterns on her hide had been pressed in by years of harness, though to me they looked like lace. When the tent came down she was taken to the field behind Tanner's farm where the rain pooled in the ruts. The little one was not supposed to be there at all. Nobody had planned for a calf in a village with no bread to spare. Dad said it would be dead by Easter. It was not. Our Davy fed it bread soaked in milk from a tin, and by May it trotted behind its mother down the lane like a shadow that had been given a trunk.

I remember the evening Davy came in black to the eyes from the shift, sat on the step and drew on the back of an old feed bill with a stub of pencil. Flowers inside flowers, rings inside rings, the way Mrs Armstrong's stitching went round her hoop. He drew the big one first, then the small one, and he curled the little one's trunk back to the tail of its mother so the line never broke. "So she knows where it is," he said, and went up to bed before I could argue.

They took the animals away at the end of the summer. The lane is houses now. But the wall by the Co-op still holds the marks where we pressed our hands in the dust, and when the wind comes off the pit heap I think I can see the two of them going over the top of it, one close behind the other, the little one never once letting go of the tail.