Solid black silhouette of a snake coiled into an S shape with its head raised to the left, drawn on a plain white background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Coiled snake silhouette

Blackwork · Black and grey · Flash

A single snake is drawn as a solid black silhouette, with its head raised and tongue flicking out to the left and its body looping into a open coil. The design uses smooth, unbroken outlines with no internal shading or detail, and the tail tapers to a point at the top right. It is shown in black on a plain white background with generous empty space around it.

Blackwork Snake Serpent Coil

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lorry had been idling under the sodium lights at Sallow Bridge for forty minutes when Ilse Varga pulled back the tarpaulin and found the snake. It lay on a pallet between crates of lemons, a single length of black, its head lifted a hand's width off the wood as if it had been waiting for someone with a torch. Its tongue went out once, testing the cold air, and then it settled back into its loop.

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Bram wanted the lane closed. Behind them the queue of cars ran back past the customs hut and into the mist over the river, and every minute of it was money. Ilse asked the driver, an old man named Petar who had said perhaps nine words since Kula, how the creature had come aboard. He shrugged. It had been coiled in the grove's loading bay, he said, and it had seemed to want a ride north, so he had not had the heart to refuse it. Ilse wrote *one live reptile, not declared* on the form and didn't tick the box for seizure.

She carried the pallet herself, the snake sliding into the corner of the crate as though it were a thing it had decided on. At the fence line beyond the last floodlight, where the reeds grew thick and the ditch ran black, she tipped it gently into the wet grass. The coil unwound in one slow pull. The tail was the last to go, a fine point lifting off the stubble before it slipped away, and by the time Bram called her name the grass had closed over it and there was only the cold, and the lemons, and the paperwork waiting in the hut.