Black ink line drawing of a segmented serpent biting its own tail in a circle, with the lettering Fear is the little death that brings total obliteration set around the edge.

Circular serpent design with quote lettering

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

A pencil and ink line drawing of a segmented serpent with open jaws and rows of teeth, forming a ring around an empty circular centre. The serpent's body is drawn with simple outlines and small shading strokes, and the words are set in a band around the outside of the circle. The design is shown in black on white paper with a faint pink guide line visible beneath the lettering.

Lettering Serpent Circle Teeth Lettering Quote

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The culvert gang came to Hollow Bridge in the spring of 1954 with forty lengths of ribbed iron on a flatbed, and by midsummer they had bent it into a ring round the old quarry pond. Each length was bolted to the next, so from the church tower it looked as if something had risen out of the water, circled the pond, and taken hold of its own tail. My father was foreman. He said the ring would keep the Fen back from the cottages on Mill Lane, and nobody argued, because nobody in Hollow Bridge had ever seen a flood come up Mill Lane and nobody wanted to be the first.

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The pond was drained for the work, and the middle of the ring was left bare, grey clay cracked like a dropped plate. Mr Pell, who had been at Anzio and did not talk about it, stencilled a line of black capitals along the outer band, letters as tall as my forearm. I read them every morning on the walk to school and never got to the end without losing my place. At the head of the ring the men cut a mouth into the sheeting and riveted a row of iron teeth along the lip, so the sluice gate sat in the jaws like a bit between a horse's teeth. My brother Len swore he saw the gate close on its own one evening, and I told him to stop it.

In October the rain came for nine days. On the ninth night the water rose over the lane, and my father did not come home. I took the torch down the field to the ring and found him inside it, standing in the bare middle with his boots sunk in clay, looking up at the iron curve as if it were the only thing in the county still making sense. "It keeps the empty part empty," he said. "That's the trick. You fill a hollow and the water finds something else to fill."

I picked up a stone and dropped it into the centre. It made no sound I could hear, but the whole ring hummed like a struck wire, and out past the iron the water stopped rising and began, very slowly, to go back.