Line drawing of a slender snake with black skin, red and white bands and a black head, shown as a flash design on a plain white background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Banded snake design on white

Mixed · Flash

A snake drawn in a sinuous S-curve from the tail on the left to the head on the right. The body is solid black with evenly spaced red and white bands, and the head has a small white highlight on the eye. The bold, even outline sits on a plain white background with the design centred across the frame.

Snake Serpent Band

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Now sit closer, and mind the stove door, because this is the winter Mary Aske found the snake in the seed sacks. You'll want to know how a thing so striped got into a farmhouse in January, and I'll tell you, but you'll have to hush while I do.

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The frost had the ploughed field locked hard as a bread crust, and the hay was dry and low. Mary went out to the barn with a lantern and a mug of cold tea she meant to drink standing up. Behind the third sack, where the mice had been at the oats, lay a banded snake no longer than her forearm, red and white rings running down its black back like a row of lit windows. It was not moving. It was only waiting, patient as a stone.

She could have swept it out with the broom. She didn't. She knelt, set the lantern down, and said what her father had taught her: a cold thing wants a warm place and nothing else. So she carried it up in her apron to the kitchen and laid it in the bread drawer, which was the only place in the house the cat could not reach.

By March the mice had gone from the granary. Nobody in the parish could say how. Mary said only that the snake had earned its keep, and that a debt paid in mice is the cleanest debt there is. When the thaw came she opened the barn door and it slid out into the mud, red bands bright against the wet earth, and it did not look back. That's the story, and it's the only true one I've got.