Black and grey realism sleeve tattoo on an upper arm and forearm, showing a long-haired man pointing, with smoke, potion bottles, a snake and a skull.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black and grey portrait sleeve with skull and snake

Realism · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A full arm sleeve shows a shaded portrait of a long-haired man with his index finger pointing towards the viewer, with a thin object held near his mouth. Below the portrait, wisps of smoke lead to potion bottles, a coiled snake and a skull with shaded eye sockets. The work uses smooth grey shading and fine detail in black ink, with strong contrast and no colour, and the photograph is taken against a plain light background.

Realism Upper arm Forearm Portrait Man Smoke Snake Skull Sleeve

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Tobias Wren had been told never to light the stove in the lamp room, so on the night the 9.40 was cancelled he lit it anyway. The wind had got under the platform roof and the old clock had stopped at a quarter past eleven. He filled a copper pan with rainwater, a pinch of coal dust and three drops of the green stuff his grandmother kept in a brown bottle, then waited for the smoke to tell him something.

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The smoke rose in grey coils, folded over the timetable boards and slid down the stairwell to the platform where the snake lived. Everyone on the Carrow line knew about the snake. It lay in the drain beneath the bench and came up only when a train was late, shedding its skin in the gutter like a torn ticket. Tobias had never seen it, though he had seen its shadow, and he had seen the skull on the signal box sill, the one with hollow eyes that the porters swore followed the last carriage out.

At midnight a man stepped off the empty platform in a long dark coat. He raised one finger, the way a stationmaster does when he is counting heads. "You are three minutes behind," he said, and Tobias understood he was not speaking to him but to the clock. The smoke bent towards the man like a dog to its owner. The snake uncoiled from the drain, its scales catching the lamplight, and the potion bottles along the sill began to hum.

The clock gave a shudder and started again. By morning the stove was cold, the pan was dry, and the only sign of the night was a fresh skin in the gutter, thin as tissue, printed with a ticket number for a train that had never run.