Black and grey realism tattoo of a rearing cobra with a raised hood and coiled body on the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cobra tattoo on upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A large cobra rises from a coiled base with its hood spread wide and its head angled towards the viewer. The scales and ribbed body are rendered with smooth grey shading and bright highlights that give the snake a three-dimensional look. The design is entirely in black and grey ink and fills most of the frame against the skin.

Realism Upper arm Snake Hood Coil Scale

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The tarpaulin over your stall has started to sag, and rainwater pools in its folds until you have to push it up with a broom handle. Someone two stalls down is shouting that the lemons are going for a pound a bag. You have sold nothing since eleven, only a man who asked whether the brass candlesticks were real and then walked off before you could answer. The rain runs off your hood and down the back of your neck.

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Beneath the trestle table sits the old basket your uncle brought back from Lahore wrapped in a sack of rugs. Nothing lives in it now. You keep it because the lid is carved with a cobra, hood spread wide, and when the lamp catches the grain the carving seems to lean forward to watch the crowd. Your uncle used to say a cobra never strikes unless it has been ignored for a very long time.

At half four a girl in a yellow mac stops and lifts the lid. She asks what the snake costs. You tell her it costs more than she has, and she laughs, and you realise she is right to. She sets a bent five pence on the wet wood and says she will come back when the rain stops. You watch her weave between the fish stalls, and the carving on the lid seems to bow after her.

At six you pack up in the dark, lift the basket onto your shoulder and walk home with the rain at your back. The five pence sits in your pocket against your hip. Tomorrow you will set the lid on the table again and wait for someone with more nerve than sense.