Two black and grey elephant tattoos with raised trunks, one on a thigh and one on a lower back, seen from behind in a black and white photo.

Two similar elephant tattoos on thigh and back

Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

Two people are shown from behind, each with a tattoo of an ornately patterned elephant with its trunk raised. The left tattoo sits on the upper thigh and the right on the lower back, and both have a small script mark above the trunk. The elephants are shaded in grey with fine detailed patterning on their bodies, and the photograph is in black and white.

Thigh Back Elephant Trunk Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The elephants came off the lorry at Harwich in the drizzle, two grey shapes patterned all over like old bedspreads, and Mrs Okafor told the yard they would answer to nothing but their proper names. Nobody believed her until the first dawn, when the younger one, Lila, heard the letter L called across the sawdust and lifted her trunk into a loop above her head, as neat as a schoolgirl's flourish.

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Arthur Penhale had the night watch on the fairground that winter, with a paraffin lantern and a flask of stewed tea for company. He liked the elephants best between two and four, when the stalls were shuttered and the sea sounded like a crowd beyond the sheds. He would sit on an upturned crate and trace the painted diamonds on Lila's flank with one finger, counting them aloud because counting kept him awake, and somewhere around the hundredth he always heard Mab, the older one, exhale through her trunk as if she were sighing at his arithmetic.

In February the lantern guttered out in a squall and Arthur sat in the dark, certain he would find the sheds empty when the light came back. Instead both trunks were raised, two curls of grey against the grey sky, and each had hooked a small mark out of the air above it. He knew the marks without seeing them. Mrs Okafor had sewn them into the blankets years before, the initials of people who had owned them once, and they had carried those letters across the water like luggage.

When the light came back he took a stick from the sawdust and wrote his own initial in the dirt, slowly, the way he had been taught at school. Mab watched him, then curled her trunk down and drew the letter back into the air beside her own, neatly, the way one finishes a sentence someone else has started.