Black line drawing of a caduceus, with a winged staff entwined by two snakes, on a white background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Caduceus line drawing

Black and grey · Flash

The image shows a winged staff entwined by two snakes, drawn as a symmetrical design. The outlines are bold and solid black, with simple hatching and no shading. The design is centred on a white background with no skin or body part visible.

Wing Staff Snake

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The brass lamp over the galley stove had been swinging all night, and Tobias Crane had stopped noticing it somewhere around the third watch. What he noticed was the sound from the sick berth forward: a rasp of breath, then a pause long enough to make him set down the kettle. Mr Pell, the bosun, had come to him at dusk with a split palm gone the colour of plums. The surgeon was drunk in Valparaiso and nobody had thought to fetch him back, so Crane had opened the hand with the thin blade he used for the salt beef and packed it with lint soaked in rum.

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Dr Arnaud's old almanac lay open on the flour bin, its pages foxed and soft from the damp. Beneath a drawing of a winged staff with two serpents coiled up its length, the surgeon had written in pencil: balance, not conquest. Crane read it twice by the lamplight. He had always thought the snakes were there to frighten people. Now it seemed to him they were only two things pulling against each other until a man found the middle and stood still, the way he stood between the boiling copper and the cold hatch with a ladle in each hand.

By the morning watch the fever had broken. Pell lay with his eyes shut and his good hand flat on the blanket, muttering about a debt at cards. Crane wiped his hands on his apron and went up the ladder into a grey wind. The sails had filled overnight and the ship was making her turn for home, and somewhere astern the gulls were wheeling over the wake like something pinned to the sky.

He went below to start the porridge. On the flour bin the almanac had closed itself, and the staff was hidden again under its brown cover.