Pencil-style drawing of a coiled cobra with green watercolour washes and the word Slytherin in script beneath it, shown as a tattoo design with no body placement.

Coiled snake with Slytherin lettering

Lettering · Mixed · Flash

A coiled cobra with raised hood is drawn in fine dark linework with light hatching and scale detail. Loose green watercolour washes sit behind the snake, and the word Slytherin is written in black calligraphic script below it. The composition is centred on a pale textured paper background.

Lettering Snake Script Watercolour

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

Marjorie Penhallow had counted the steps of Gellan Keep every morning for thirty-one years, and every morning there were fewer of them. The north stair had gone in the storm of '82, taking two landings and the bell rope with it. What remained was a spiral of green-black stone that the ivy had decided to own.

Keep reading

The snake lived where the stair met the old kitchen wall. She had never named it. It was the length of her forearm when she first saw it, a grey thing that lifted its hood at the sound of her boots and then, unhurried, settled back into the warm crack behind the hearth. The villagers said the Keep had kept a snake since the Hollingsworth lords, to frighten off thieves. Marjorie thought that was nonsense. Nothing frightened thieves in this country but the rain.

The county surveyors came in June with their rods, their clipboards and a letter saying the tower would come down by autumn. Marjorie found the youngest of them, a lad called Tobias Quill, sitting on the bottom step eating a pear. She told him about the snake. He laughed, then stopped laughing when it rose out of the hearth crack and held its hood above the pear, unblinking, as if asking for its share.

He wrote in his report that the tower was unsafe and the snake was a matter for the wildlife trust. He left out the bit about the pear. In September Marjorie climbed the last sound steps with a tin of milk and a chipped bowl, and the ivy was already green over the stone where the surveyors' chalk had been. The snake drank, and the light came through the arrow slit in a long green wash across the floor.