Traditional style tattoo of a green and red cobra rising above a patterned coil, with two small red flowers, on a lower leg.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cobra and flowers on a lower leg

Traditional · Calf · Mixed · Photo

A cobra with a raised, patterned hood and open-mouthed head sits on a coiled base decorated with dotted bands and triangles. Two small red flowers and a leaf fill the space beside the body. Bold black outlines define the shapes, with solid green, red, yellow and cream fills and some dotted detailing.

Traditional Calf Snake Flower Leaf Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cobra came aboard at Aden in a tea chest with three punched air holes, and the bosun swore on his mother that the chest was empty until the lid lifted from inside and a hood unfolded like a dirty fan. Nobody had told me the cargo would include a snake. I was nineteen, the Halcyon Lass was bound from Liverpool to Rangoon with coal and cotton, and forty crates of red geraniums rode in the forward hold for a nursery that had paid in advance.

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Pell, the cargo clerk, had bought the snake off a charmer in the Aden bazaar for two rupees and a bottle of gin, meaning to sell it on at Rangoon to a man who wanted something exotic for his garden wall. For a fortnight it lived under the tarpaulin beside the geranium crates, and the rats forward went so quiet that the whole watch grew cheerful. The cook fed it scraps of tinned herring. It took them from a spoon, which I still find hard to believe.

Off Ceylon the weather turned and the ship rolled like a drunk on a pier. One night I found the snake coiled on the top crate, its hood flared against the lamp, and I stood there with a bucket of seawater while the spray came down the hatch. It did not strike. It only watched me with that cream-coloured face, as if it had been told what I was and was prepared to be civil about it.

We docked at Rangoon in the wet season. Pell sold the cobra to a flute player for the price of his supper, and the nursery man carried his geraniums away on a handcart. I kept one red bloom that had snapped in the crossing and pressed it between the pages of my logbook. I have never since lifted a tea chest lid without standing to one side.