Black and grey drawing of a coiled snake with rose shapes and leaves, shown as a tattoo design in a blackwork and botanical style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Coiled snake with roses and leaves design

Blackwork · Black and grey · Flash

A black and grey drawing of a snake coiled in several loops, with its head at the top and a small eye detail visible. Rose-like shapes and leaves with fine vines sit around the body. The linework is bold and the body is filled with dense hatching and dotted shading, with white highlights along the scales.

Blackwork Botanical Snake Serpent Rose Leaf Vine Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The road over the pass was open only three months of the year, and Ottilie Harrow kept the toll hut at its summit with her brother's old dog and a stove that smoked whenever the wind came from the east. In the thaw of that spring a carter came up with a mule that would not stop looking back over its shoulder. He said there was a snake on the lower switchbacks, as long as a cart and coiled round the rocks like rope left out in the rain, and it had come down out of the scree to drink from the spring by the cairn.

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Ottilie did not believe him until she walked down with a lantern and saw it. The creature lay in loops across the path, its head raised above the grey stones, and between its coils had grown roses, black-red and hard as coal, with leaves curling out of the cracks in the rock. Where the light caught its back, every scale showed a pale edge, like frost on iron. It did not strike. It looked at her with one eye that held the lantern flame like a bead of water.

She sat down on the cold stone beside it and told it what her mother had told her, that the pass had always belonged to something older than the road, and that the road was only permitted because people paid the toll. The snake turned its head slowly and laid its chin across her boot. In the morning the path was clear, and three roses had opened on the cairn where none had grown before. The carter took his mule over without looking back, and Ottilie left the lantern lit on the wall all that summer, though no one ever asked her why.