Black and grey caduceus tattoo with wings, a snake-wrapped staff and a heartbeat line on the top of a foot, with small lettering around the emblem.

Caduceus with wings on a foot

Other · Black and grey · Photo

A winged caduceus, with a staff and two snakes, is tattooed on the top of a bare foot, with small lettering around the emblem and a thin heartbeat line beneath it. The work uses grey shading and fine outlines to show the feathers, staff and snakes in soft tones. The foot rests on a dark flip-flop against a dark textured surface, with denim at the ankle and teal toenails.

Other Wing Snake Staff Heartbeat line Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the wind up here takes the ends off words. My grandmother kept a brass staff at the top of the Hallan pass, and on it two snakes wound round a rod, with wings opening above them the way you'd see on a coach-house sign. Travellers thought it marked the carriers. It belonged to the bonesetter who lived in the stone hut below the snowline, a man called Teodor Pask, who had a cough that never left him and hands that never shook.

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One February a girl came up the track with a broken sheepdog in her arms and a letter pinned to her coat. The letter said the dog was her brother's, and her brother was in the valley with a fever the priest had given up on. Pask set the leg by lamplight. He counted the dog's breaths aloud as he worked, one, two, the way he counted the snow falling past the window, and when he finished he bound the splint with a strip of red cloth and told her the staff would wait for the thaw.

The girl went down the mountain in the morning. The snow came back that night, and for three days nobody crossed. When the track cleared, Pask had gone. In his hut the brass staff leaned against the stove, its wings polished bright by someone's thumb, and scratched into the wood beneath it with a nail was a line that jumped and fell like a heartbeat, and a single word that meant come back.