Solid black scorpion tattoo with a segmented body, raised pincers and a curled tail forming a scorpio-style symbol, on skin.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black scorpion tattoo with curled tail

Other · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a scorpion with a segmented body built from solid black blocks and dashes, raised pincers and a long curled tail that ends in a stinger. The tail curls up into a stylised symbol at the top right that resembles a scorpio glyph. The ink is pure black with bold, even edges and no shading or colour, set against lightly freckled skin.

Other Scorpion Zodiac

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The fiddler at the Saltmarsh Pavilion had a rule that nobody danced the last waltz without paying the scorpion man. Nobody knew his name. He came in every October with the tide, a thin fellow in a grey coat, and he stood by the cloakroom hatch with his hands folded in front of him like a pair of pincers. The old women said he had been there when the pier was built, and that he took his fee in turns, never in coin.

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Mara Quill, who baked the bread for the harbour cafes and had been born in November under the sign with the curled tail, said she would pay nothing to anyone. She went to the hall in her good blue dress and danced with the miller's son until her hem caught on the floorboards and tore. When the fiddler struck up the last waltz, the scorpion man was at her elbow before she had finished laughing. He did not ask for money. He asked for one step taken backwards, the way a scorpion walks when it has been startled, and he said she would know which step it was when she came to it.

She did not know it that night. She walked home along the sea wall with her torn hem and her hands black with flour. In the morning, when she lifted the lid of her bread tin, she found a row of small black marks pressed into the dough, segmented like a tail, curling up at the end into a shape that looked like a letter from an alphabet she had never learned. She understood then that she had already taken the step, and that the scorpion man had been polite about it.