Close-up of a forearm with a cartoon-style tattoo of a white skull with black eye sockets, with a green striped snake coiling around it and a red tongue.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cartoon skull and green snake on a forearm

Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A green, yellow and black striped snake wraps around a white cartoon skull with a brown outline and a solid black eye. The linework is bold and simple, with flat colour fills and no shading. The tattoo sits centrally on the forearm against plain pale skin, with the snake's head at the lower right.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Brother Osric had been told, in four separate chapters, that the snake was not a pet. Yet every morning it slid out of the hollow beneath the refectory step and coiled round the windowsill where Brother Cuthbert kept the skull, and every morning Prior Gudmund sighed like a bellows with a hole in it.

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The skull was the trouble. Nobody knew whose it was. It had turned up in the mill race the spring the river flooded, grinning at us with one eye socket blackened by the damp. Brother Cuthbert had scrubbed it white with ash and lard and declared it a memento mori so cheerful that nobody could take it seriously. The snake had taken it seriously enough to wrap itself round the thing. Striped like a barley sugar stick, green as new hay, it held the skull up to the light like a candle in a dish.

I went to the prior on the feast of the Translation with a plea. Let the snake keep the skull, I said, and let the skull keep the snake, and let the community keep its peace. He looked at me for a long while over his spectacles. Then he asked whether the snake had been given a name.

I said it had not.

"Then it shall be Brother Jonah," he said, "since it will not come out of the belly of anything it has not already swallowed." He pulled a pen from his sleeve and wrote it into the register, and to this day the entry sits there in brown ink: one skull, one serpent, one brother, reconciled.

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