Simple black outline drawing of a smiling cartoon snake with a coiled body and blushing cheeks, shown as a tattoo flash design with no placement.

Cartoon snake coiled on white

Mixed · Flash

A cartoon snake with a large round head, closed smiling eyes, pink blush marks and a coiled body is drawn in bold black outline on a white background. The shading is light and soft, with small tick marks along the neck suggesting scales and a grey tint on the coils. The composition is centred, with the head raised above the coils and the tail curling up on the left.

Snake Cartoon Coil

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

By the third hour of the coolant leak the hydroponics bay is ankle deep in steam, and the only creature aboard still smiling is the snake. Pelham has been coiled on the gantry rail since the ship left orbit, a fat white thing with a head like a dinner plate and eyes shut tight in contentment. You have asked the medics twice whether a snake can be trusted in a sealed habitat. They say it eats only the mould.

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Now you are on your knees behind a valve wheel the size of a cartwheel, spanner slipping on the wet grating, and the rail above you creaks. Pelham uncoils, drops with a soft slap onto the pipe you need, and rests its chin right on the joint where the seal has blown. Heat pours off it. You wait for the alarm to tell you this is the worst idea in four generations of planning, but the alarm stays quiet, and so does the snake, blushing pink in the glow of the emergency lamps.

"Move," you tell it, which it ignores, because it has never once moved when told. So you turn the wheel by hand with your shoulder, the good one, and the valve grinds shut. Steam sighs out of the pipe and thins to nothing. Pelham slides down the rail and coils itself around your boot as if it has been waiting all its life to be useful.

Afterwards the captain asks for a report. You write one line: the snake did most of the work. It is filed under Miscellaneous, between a broken kettle and a lost spanner, and that night you find Pelham asleep in the warm hollow of your locker, grinning at nothing.