Black, grey and gold drawing of a coiled snake with stippled dotwork rays behind its head, shown as a tattoo design on plain paper.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Coiled snake with gold discs

Dotwork · Mixed · Flash

A snake coils vertically down the page, with its head raised at the top and its tongue extended. Its body is filled with black ink, grey stripes and gold lines, and it passes through a column of gold discs outlined in white. Fine stippled dots radiate from behind the head, and the plain off-white background keeps the design isolated.

Dotwork Snake Serpent Circle Dot Ray

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Tomas, the guide will not say the snake's name aloud up here, so I shall not write it either. He only says the black serpent with the gold belly lives under the lee of the hut and comes out when the snow has softened enough to run. Last week I laughed at him. This morning I counted the discs on the rock wall by the spring, seven of them, pale gold where the sun catches the lichen, and I have stopped laughing.

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You would hate the pass. Every night the wind comes off the scree and rattles the shutter, and every night I hear something moving under the floorboards, slow and deliberate, like someone unwinding rope. Mother's ring is in the biscuit tin under my bunk. I have not told the guide that. He would say I should have left it on the lower path as an offering, the way the old drovers did.

Yesterday the cloud broke and the whole valley lit up below us, rays spilling over the ridge as if someone had opened a door. I thought of you and our stupid bet about who would reach the top first. The guide pointed to a spiral of tiny marks in the dust at the threshold and said the snake had gone up to meet the light and would be back for the rest of us in autumn.

I am coming down on Thursday with the mules. Put the kettle on. I will bring the tin, and I will tell you which of us was right about the mountain. Love, Ada