Watercolour style tattoo of an elephant with its trunk raised and a blue wash behind it, placed on a person's upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Watercolour elephant on upper back

Back · Mixed · Photo

A large elephant with its head turned and trunk curled upward fills the upper back, shown in brown and grey tones. Soft shading and loose blue washes behind and beneath the animal give a painted, watercolour effect, with splatters and drips at the lower edge. The composition is centred on the elephant, with the blue wash framing it across the shoulder blade area.

Back Elephant Trunk Watercolour Splatter

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Tom,

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You will not believe what came out of the alder wood on Tuesday. I was pegging sheets when the wind dropped and I heard water running the wrong way, up the meadow instead of down. Then the elephant walked out of the trees, grey as wet slate, its ears folded back like a pair of old gloves. It was not hurrying. It stopped in the flood where the Mere has spread over the lower field and lifted its trunk to the sky, as if it were testing the weather.

Mr Pargeter from the mill says it belonged to the travelling fair that wintered at Cold Harbour, and that the fair's painter had done it on a canvas so the crowds could see the beast before they paid. The canvas rotted years since. He says the elephant must have soaked up the blue from the river the way blotting paper takes ink. Nobody believes him, but I saw the river that evening, and it was the blue of that old backdrop, the blue of the sky just before a storm.

Last night I took the lamp down to the water. The elephant was still there, deeper in now, and the drips it left on the grass were bright as spilt paint. I did not go close. I only said your name, the way you used to say mine when we were small and frightened of the dark, and it turned its head. Its eye was patient and wet and very old. Then it went back into the alders, the water went with it, and the meadow was only mud and frogs.

Come home at Easter. Bring your brushes. I think the field needs painting over, and I would rather it were you doing it than the fair.

Your sister, Maud