Solid black blackwork flash design of a winged serpent curled into a ring around a six-pointed star made of interlocking triangles.

Black serpent ring with triangle star

Blackwork · Black and grey · Flash

The design shows a horned, winged serpent-like creature with a spiked head and fin-like wings, forming a ring around its body. Inside the ring, six triangles form a star with small gaps between them. The artwork uses solid black fills with no shading or grey, on a plain white background, and the composition is centred and symmetrical.

Blackwork Geometric Serpent Dragon Wing Ring Triangle Star

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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

Mind the mud by the big top, my duck, it has eaten better men than you. Sit where the lamp reaches. Now, the Pennock Travelling Marvels had one thing left that the bailiffs wanted, and that was a painted serpent hung above the ring, black as a coal scuttle, with its tail in its mouth and six little triangles set inside it like the points of a sheriff's star. Old Ada Pennock swore it was the snake that had swallowed the first winter, and the family believed her, because she had married the ringmaster on a dare and never once lost a bet.

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Winter came up the Fens that year like a bad lodger. Wages went unpaid, the elephant went to a farm near Boston, and the only living thing still performing was a thin lad called Tobias Crane, who could walk the length of the guy-ropes on his hands. Every night he stopped at the painting, touched the curl of its back, and said the same thing to it: give me one more town. The painted snake, being paint, never answered.

On the last night the wind tore the canvas flap and the lamps went out one by one. Tobias did not run. He climbed the centre pole, hooked his knees over the iron ring at the top, and found that the gaps between the triangles lined up exactly with the rope hooks along the crown. He unpicked them one at a time. The tent came down around him, sheet by sheet, and by morning the flat field was strewn with pale triangles of canvas that the farmers still use to patch their barns, and nobody in the Fens has ever asked why.