Smooth Elephants Foot with Horn (Snail) Tobacco Pipe

The elephant's foot, especially in the hands of Tom Eltang, is the perfect shape for the fan of great birdseye. The large front panel offers a spectacular canvas for beautiful, intricate, perfectly stained and contrasted birdseye. Tom's Golden Contrast stain just does such special things with birdseye. The soft, gently curving shank is such a great complement to the fairly angular shield shaped bowl. I love what Tom has done with the horn ferrule especially. Tom has boxes and boxes of great horn that he uses for ferrules: it's hardly surprising that he uses such beautiful pieces of horn on special pieces like this one.

-- Sykes Wilford