Black and grey coiled snake tattoo with hatched shading and bold outlines on the outer forearm, with a small curling line above its head.

Coiled snake on a forearm

Blackwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A large snake coils several times across the forearm, with its head raised near the top and its tail curling at the bottom. The body is filled with fine parallel hatching and stippled texture, with heavy black outlines defining each loop. The tattoo is entirely black and grey, set against pale skin and a grey patterned shirt and paved ground in the background.

Blackwork Forearm Snake Serpent Coil Curl

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Pardoe never let animals up the stairs at Gull Rock House, so when Mr Ashdown came in off the wet pier with a sack over his shoulder, I stood square in the hallway and told him so. He only smiled and said it was rope. It was rope for about a second. When he tipped the sack onto the rag rug in room four, the thing inside uncoiled, grey and striped like wet slate, and kept uncoiling until it had made three loops under the washstand and lifted its head toward the window.

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He paid a month in advance, in silver, and asked for the room facing the harbour. The snake lived in the bottom drawer of the chest and ate pilchards from the fishmonger on Harbour Row. Guests complained of hissing in the pipes. I never heard it hiss. What I did hear, mornings, was the scrape of a body shifting, and each day the coil seemed tighter, the raised head angled a little further toward the water, as if it were counting the boats coming in.

In February a gale came up the Channel and Mr Ashdown did not come down to breakfast. I took the spare key up at noon. The bed was made, his boots were gone, and his coat hung on the hook, salt-stiff but dry. The snake had left the drawer. It was wound around the bell pull by the door, its tail hooked through the iron ring, and when the wind rattled the window the bell spoke once, low and clear, a sound I had not heard since the wreck of the Morwenna in '31.

I did not take the snake down. I left the pull alone and set a saucer of pilchards on the landing. Some lodgers pay in advance and some pay in other ways, and the sea, which takes what it likes, had sent its own receipt.