Close photo of a shaded grey snake tattoo with dark spots and a pink tongue on the upper arm, set against green foliage.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Coiled snake with green foliage on upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A grey and white snake with dark spots coils across the upper arm, its head turned down and its pink forked tongue extended. Soft grey shading gives the scales and head volume, and a reddish-brown shape sits behind the body. Green and yellow foliage fills the background above the snake, and the photo is taken at an angle with some low lighting.

Realism Upper arm Snake Foliage Tongue Spots

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The python had got into the herb garden again, and when I found him he was coiled through the sage like a dropped length of hose, tongue working at the air above the lavender. Brother Cuthbert wanted him gone before Vespers. The abbot had sent word that a snake in the physic garden was no fit thing for a house of prayer, and Cuthbert had taken the sentence to heart, which is how he came to be standing on the bottom step with a sack and a face like weather.

Keep reading

The creature had come to us in a crate of Lisbon oranges three winters ago, left at the postern gate with no name, only a label in a hand none of us could read. Brother Ambrose, who had kept bees before he kept silence, decided it was a gift from God and named it Mercy. Mercy had a grey back marked with dark rings, the colour of wet slate under a beech, and the first thing it did whenever it was frightened was roll itself into a tight knot the size of a loaf and refuse to be anything else.

Ambrose was the only one who could lift it. He did so now, slowly, one hand under the belly, and it uncurled over his wrist with a patience that made Cuthbert sit down on the wall. Mercy looked at me with its small, unhurried eyes, then turned its head down toward the sage, where the mice that had been eating our seed corn lay in a row like dropped gloves.

We took the snake back to the granary that evening instead of the sack. The abbot, when he came to see, said nothing at all, which is how I knew he had been counting the mice too.