Large full back tattoo of a circular alchemical emblem with a triangle and hexagram, red serpent bands and Latin-style text around the edge, placed across the upper and middle back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Alchemical emblem across a back

Back · Mixed · Photo

A large circular emblem sits at the centre of the back, containing a triangle within a six-pointed star and a small symbol below it. Red and green-grey bands curve around the circle like a serpent, with Latin-style text in a serif script filling the space around them. The linework is bold and the palette is limited to red, green, grey and black, with the design framed symmetrically by the shoulder blades.

Back Circle Triangle Serpent Latin text Emblem

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit nearer the stove, the lot of you, because the frost has got into the lane again and my knees are telling me it means business. Mind the cat. That grey brute has been sleeping on the bread since Martinmas.

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Old Hollis Crane kept the farm at Low Scarth when I was a boy, and he kept a copper pot in the cellar that nobody was allowed to touch. It had a ring of red paint round its lip and a snake scratched into the lid, eating its own tail. Every January he would go down with a candle and a Latin book held shut with string, and he would read aloud to the walls for an hour. We thought he was mad. The hens thought so too.

The winter the beck froze to the bottom, his ewes went down with the rot, the barn roof came in, and the lad who helped him, Tom Brisco, carried the pot up to the kitchen and offered it to the pedlar for a shilling. Hollis got up from his chair without a word, walked out to the cart in his stockinged feet, and took it back. The pot was not for selling, he said. It was for keeping the year's word honest.

Come spring the rot had gone out of the flock and the roof was mended with Tom's own timber. When they lifted the lid there was nothing inside but rainwater and one silver coin stamped with a six-pointed star. Hollis laughed till he coughed. That's the trouble with alchemy, he said. It always gives you back exactly what you put in.