Colour tattoo of an elephant in a watercolour style with pink, purple and teal washes and a black outline, on the top of a foot.

Watercolour elephant on a foot

Other · Colour · Photo

A black outlined elephant walks to the right across the top of a foot, shown in side view with its trunk lowered. The body is filled with loose, blended washes of pink, violet, purple and teal that spill slightly beyond the outline, giving a watercolour effect. The photo is taken from above on a carpeted floor, with the toes and their pink painted nails visible at the bottom of the frame.

Other Elephant

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The frost had come down so hard overnight that the ruts in the lane held their shape like poured tin, and Dad was already out in the yard with the jars before the light was properly up. "Hold the lid still, Nell," he said, and I held it, watching the water go from clear to a bruised violet as he worked the brush round the ink.

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He had been asked to paint an elephant on the side of Pickering's grain store, the one the lorries backed into every Tuesday. Mr Pickering wanted something that would make people look up. Dad sketched it in black first: a box for a body, four stumps for legs, a trunk hanging low like a wet rope. Then he washed the colour in loose, careless pools, pink for the ear, teal for the flank, and the paint bled past the lines as if the animal had been standing out in the rain for years.

The elephant was finished by Thursday. On Friday morning the wall was bare. Someone had left the gate open, and the tracks ran out across the field, four big round prints beside the thin, scratchy ones of the hens. Dad said nothing. He only pulled his cap down and followed.

We found it at the bottom of the far meadow, standing among the frozen thistles with its trunk down, rubbing its flank against the hedge. Where the colour had come away on the frost it had left smudges of pink and violet across the white ground, and the elephant lifted its head and looked at us, unbothered, as though it had only come out for a walk. Dad laughed for the first time that winter. We let it finish the field.