Traditional style tattoo of a red and black coiled snake with orange and teal dots and a small butterfly above it, placed across the centre of a person's chest.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Coiled snake and butterfly on chest

Traditional · Chest · Mixed · Photo

A large snake coils across the torso with its head at the upper right, tongue extended, and a small butterfly sits above it. The snake has bold black outlines, solid red bands, and black bodies dotted with orange and teal spots. The design fills the centre of the image with clean, heavy linework and flat colour on pale skin.

Traditional Chest Snake Butterfly Serpent Coil Tongue

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody at Dover wanted to open the third trailer on a wet Tuesday, least of all me, but the sniffer dog had sat down in front of it and would not budge. Behind the stacked hay bales and a rolled banner of a strongman was a steel cabin trunk with a hole punched in each corner. Mr Caddick, the fairground man, said it held a snake called Juno and that she had gone off her food.

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I lifted the lid with the torch in my teeth. Juno lay coiled the size of a dinner plate, her red bands bright as a pillar box, her black bodies dotted with orange like marmalade on slate. Her head rose to the light and her tongue came out in that long red fork, tasting the air as if she had been waiting all morning for someone to ask her a question. A Red Admiral had got in somehow and was walking the rim, opening and closing its wings.

The paperwork was in order if you squinted. A licence for a constrictor, though Juno was a king snake bought from a shop in Leeds, and a health sheet with a stamp that had run in the rain. I should have written him up. Instead I watched the butterfly lift off and settle on the edge of the trunk, just above her head, and I thought that the French side would not care what came over the water in a box with holes in it. I stamped the form myself.

Caddick sent a postcard from Calais a fortnight later. Juno had eaten a whole mouse, he wrote, and the butterfly had never once left the lorry. The picture on the front was a drawing in biro of the snake wrapped around a lighthouse. I have it on my fridge now. Juno is coiled around the words Nothing to declare, and the butterfly is sitting on the e.