Colour tattoo sleeve with red apples, leaves and green snake scales across the chest, shoulder and arm of a shirtless man against a black background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Apples and snake sleeve on chest and arm

Realism · Chest · Colour · Photo

The tattoo covers the chest, shoulder and arm, with two shaded red apples hanging from branches with green leaves at the top of the chest. A green and yellow snake wraps down the upper arm and forearm, with detailed scale texture and highlights. A realistic face is worked into the tattoo on the hand, and the figure is set against a plain black background.

Realism Botanical Chest Shoulder Upper arm Forearm Hand Apple Leaves Branch Snake Scale Face

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The apples were going soft in the hold of the barge Marigold, and nobody on the cut would take them through Oakham lock because the orchard man had cursed his own trees the spring before. So Tom Ruddock carried the last crate aboard himself, and somewhere between the lock gates and the willows a green snake came down off the bank and coiled around the handrail as if it had paid the toll.

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"Leave it be," said his grandmother, who had worked the boats since the canal was dug and had seen snakes ride the bow before. "It wants a ride to the next water. Give it an apple and it will go." He cut a red one in halves and set the bright side up on the rail. The snake took a slow bite with its head tipped sideways, and its scales shone yellow where the sun caught them, like wet brass.

They ran on past the mill and the sluice, and the snake stayed. By the time the barge reached the tidal reach it had worked down the mooring rope to the water and back up again, and the old woman said the river had sent it to collect a debt. Tom asked what debt. She pointed at the tiller, where her husband had carved a man's face into the wood forty years earlier, a face nobody had ever finished. "Pay it," she said, "and the apples are yours."

At the estuary he fed the snake the rest of the crate, one apple at a time, until the hold was empty and the barge rode light on the tide. The snake slid off into the reeds without a sound. The carved face on the tiller seemed, for once, to have its mouth shut. Tom sold the Marigold the next spring and never again carried fruit past a lock without asking whose it was.