Black and grey traditional snake tattoo coiled in an S shape across the abdomen, with bold outlines and dotted scale detail.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Coiled snake on the abdomen

Traditional · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A snake coils in an S shape across the abdomen, its head raised at the top with the tongue flicking out. Bold black outlines, solid black fills, dotted scale rows and grey shading give it a traditional look. The navel is visible at the left edge against lightly haired skin.

Traditional Other Snake Serpent Tongue Coil

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Don't let the mate tell you it came aboard at Gibraltar with the salt beef, because it didn't. It came up out of the flour bin the morning after we rounded the Lizard, and it was lying across the sack of dried peas as if it had paid for them. I took the broom to it. It lifted its head off the sacking, slow as a parson rising for the psalm, and it flicked its tongue at the galley air, tasting tar and onions and my own bad temper. Then it looked at me the way a man looks at a debt. I put the broom down.

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Eli, the ship's boy, wanted to keep it in a biscuit tin with holes punched in the lid. I told him every ship pays a tithe to something, and this was ours. So we fed it the rind off the salt pork and left the bin lid propped open, and it took to coiling in the dry on the shelf above the oatmeal. Through three days of wind that stood the water up white, the weevils went quiet. The rats that had been running the stores like a mutiny stopped showing their faces. Nobody saw it do anything, but the cabin boy's sea chest stayed dry and the ham stayed sweet, and I began to think the thing had a sort of bookkeeping in it.

We came up the Bristol Channel with rain coming sideways and the decks black with coal dust. At Cardiff, as the gangway went down, I looked back and there it was, sliding down the wet planks ahead of the dockers, folding itself into an S on the cobbles as neat as a cursive capital. A carter swore and reared his horse. Then the snake went into the coal heaps and was gone, and I never once in my life found a weevil in a ship's flour after that.