Black and grey flash design of a ram skull with a serpent coiling around it, flanked by two blades and leaves, with the word Capricorn below.

Capricorn ram skull and serpent design

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A black and grey line drawing of a ram skull with curled horns, a serpent wrapping around the skull, and two long blades set behind it. Leaves and a sunburst motif sit above and around the skull, and the word Capricorn with a short italic line of text is printed beneath. The linework uses fine hatching, shading and stippled dots on a plain white background.

Botanical Snake Serpent Knife Blade Leaves Sunburst Horn

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain had been coming down on the market since six, drumming the awnings until the stalls sounded like a drum kit someone had left out. I was counting coppers for a pair of carving knives when the man with the ram's skull walked in under my canopy, shaking water from a coat that smelled of lamp oil and church candles.

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He set the skull down on my trestle between the cheese knives and the tins of boot polish. Curled horns, yellowed bone, and a grey serpent looped through the eye sockets as if it had come to sleep there. The snake's scales were dry. Nothing else on that stall was dry. 'Two blades,' he said, tapping the cracked brow. 'Long ones, never sharpened. My grandfather's. In exchange I'll tell you where the rain stops.' I told him I only traded what I could cut, and he smiled the way men smile at dogs that have decided to bite.

Then the serpent lifted its head and slid down the bone onto the wet cobbles, and every drop hanging from the awning froze mid-fall for the length of a breath. Sunlight came through, thin and gold, striking the bone with a sound like a bell. The man bent, picked up the snake, and wound it round his wrist as easily as a scarf. 'Tipping point,' he said. 'Everyone thinks the gods are the hard part. It's knowing which side of the knife you're standing on.'

When the rain came back ten minutes later I found the blades on my trestle, still in their sheaths, and beside them a single curled horn tip, warm as a cup of tea. I have never sharpened them. I keep them where the light falls first in the morning, and I don't ask which of us was the monster.