Black ink tattoo of two elephants walking in single file across the thigh, with intricate patterned linework filling their bodies.

Two ornate elephants walking on a thigh

Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows two elephants walking to the right, the smaller one trailing behind the larger, with trunks nearly touching. Their bodies are filled with dense, decorative patterns of swirls, scallops and paisley-like motifs, outlined in fine, consistent black lines. The ink is black and grey on pale skin, and the composition runs horizontally across the photographed area with plain, neutral background skin.

Thigh Elephant Pattern Mandala Ornamental

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The gate had come from a shipping agent's house in Bombay, my grandmother always said, though nobody in the family could prove it. Two elephants were cast into the iron, the larger one striding ahead with its tail curled like a question mark, the smaller one a step behind with its trunk reaching for the back of the big one's leg. Every spring I oiled the hinges, and every spring I found the same thing: the paint had lifted from the scallops on the mother's flank, and the calf's patterns had worn to bare metal where hands had pushed the gate open for seventy years.

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The garden was going to ruin when I took it on. Box had run wild along the paths and the knot beds had gone to green fog. I spent my first winter cutting the hedges back to their bones, working out the old design from the stubs left in the gravel. It had been paisley, or something like it, curling shapes the Victorians must have clipped every Saturday. Mr Pell, who had mown the lawns for forty years, told me the elephants were there before the hedges, that the gardener's wife had insisted on them.

My daughter Ruth followed me round that first summer with a trowel she never used. She liked to walk one pace behind, the way the calf did in the iron. On the last afternoon in August she stopped at the gate and said the small one was following because it was afraid of getting lost. I told her the big one was only checking the path. She said the big one kept looking back.

We left the gate open that evening, and the swallows came down over the wall to the lawn. I cut one last curl into the box beside the stone bench, a shape to match the scallop on the mother's shoulder, and Ruth held the shears steady while I did it. Neither of us said whose shape it was. The gate stayed where it was, the calf's trunk still reaching.