Small black fine line caduceus tattoo with two snakes and wings on the top of a foot near the toes, with red toenail polish.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Caduceus tattoo on the top of a foot

Fine line · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A small caduceus, with a staff, two entwined snakes and a pair of wings, is inked in black on the top of a foot near the toes. The thin, even linework is mostly solid outline with little shading, and the skin tone is the only colour in the frame apart from the red nail polish. A partial star tattoo is visible at the upper right edge of the photo.

Fine line Other Snake Wing Star Staff

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ferryman's wife kept the staff on the windowsill of the cottage at the top of Coldharbour Lane, and every night the two snakes on it would shift their coils a little, as if they had heard someone coming up the path. Nobody in Saltmarrow asked her why. They asked her to walk down when the boats came in with a hand crushed or a child gone blue, and she went, carrying the staff, and the wings on the top of it would lift as she climbed.

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One November the sea came over the breakwater before the lamps were lit. Tomas Verrey was brought up the hill on a door with his leg bent the wrong way, and the midwife sent the boy running for the ferryman's wife. She knelt by the door in the wet and laid the staff across his shin. The snakes were not gold and not silver. They were the grey of the pewter spoons her mother had kept, and when she breathed on them they seemed to breathe too.

She did not set the bone that night. She sang the old counting song under her breath, one step for each coil, until the boy stopped crying and his eyes went slow and easy. Then she pulled the leg straight in one long movement, the way you would turn a key that has rusted in its lock. In the morning Tomas walked to the harbour on a stick. The staff went back on the windowsill, and the two snakes settled their coils, and the wings stayed folded against the glass as if they had done nothing at all.