Black and grey realism style snake tattoo wrapping around the ankle and up the lower leg of a foot with black painted toenails.

Black and grey snake wrapped around an ankle

Realism · Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

A bare foot and lower leg, photographed in black and white against a dark background, with a snake tattoo coiling around the ankle and ending in a pointed tail near the top of the foot. The snake is outlined with soft shaded bands that give the body a rounded, three-dimensional look. The composition is centred on the foot, with the toes in the lower part of the frame and the leg running up to the top edge.

Realism Ankle Snake Foot Toenails

Find an artist for this

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

Ruth Carbery had sold rope on the quay at Seaward Cross for thirty years, and in all that time nothing had slipped past her eye. So when the grass snake came up through the coils of tarred hemp on the third morning of March, she did not shout. She set down her kettle and watched it test the air with its tongue, its body the colour of wet slate, banded pale where the light caught it.

Keep reading

The boatmen said it had come off the Mary Ellen, a herring coble that had wintered in Hollin Creek with a hold full of stale bilge water and bad temper. Ruth did not believe in luck. She believed in knots. She tied a bowline for the snake to wind through and left a saucer of milk on the sill, and every evening the milk was gone and the snake was a little further along the line, nearer the water.

On the last Sunday of the month the tide drew out farther than anyone could remember, leaving the harbour wall stranded in weed and the boats lying on their sides in the mud. Ruth found the snake coiled round the anchor chain of the Mary Ellen, which had been hauled up the slip for scraping. Its tail curled once around a link and stopped, pointing down at the silt like a finger.

She understood then what it wanted. She lifted the chain, cold and heavy as a sleeping dog, and walked it down to the water's edge. The snake unwound itself one loop at a time, reluctant as a cat leaving a warm hearth, and slid into the first wash of the returning sea. Its tail was the last thing she saw, a dark arrowhead turning once before the tide closed over it.