Black and grey realistic snake coiled around a round orb, tattooed on the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Coiled snake and orb on a forearm

Realism · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A large snake wraps around a smooth, shaded orb, with its head raised at the top of the design and its tail curling at the bottom. The scales are rendered with fine stippled dots and layered shading, giving the body a raised, three-dimensional look. The design is in black and grey only and runs diagonally up the forearm against a plain, softly lit background.

Realism Dotwork Forearm Snake Orb Scale Coil

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The miller's daughter Ysolde had carried bread up the goat track every morning since the river froze, and every morning the serpent was still wound around the grey stone, its head lifted as if it had been asked a question and was thinking about the answer. The people of Carrow had stopped asking what it guarded. They only asked that it keep to the hill and leave the sheep alone.

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On the ninth morning the stone was warm to the touch. Ysolde set the loaf down and saw that the serpent had loosened its coils, and the orb beneath was no longer grey but pale as a boiled egg, with a hairline crack running across its belly. The serpent looked at her with dull, patient eyes. "It is nearly time," it said, in the voice of a man who has been out in the rain too long.

She asked what would hatch. The serpent said that was for the stone to decide. Her grandmother had told her the old story: the first serpent had coiled around the sun when it fell into the sea, holding its heat through the long dark until the world remembered how to light itself. Each generation, the hill gave back one serpent to keep the warmth, and each generation someone had to be willing to let it go.

Ysolde took her knife from her apron and scraped the crack a little wider, not to break the stone but to let the heat escape. The serpent sighed, uncoiled, and slid down the path toward the river without looking back. Below her, the lamps of Carrow came on one by one. The orb in her lap was cool now, and she carried it down the hill under her shawl, saying nothing to anyone.