Neo-traditional colour tattoo on an upper limb showing an eye within a triangle, a rose, a green serpent, a banner reading BLACK and a book at the base.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Eye, rose and serpent colour piece on a limb

Neo-trad · Other · Colour · Photo

A large tattoo shows an eye inside a triangle with a yellow and orange ray behind it, above a red rose and a green serpent coiled beside smoke-like clouds. A ribbon banner reading BLACK sits at the upper left, and a book with a jewelled clasp forms the base of the design. Bold dark outlines and saturated blue, purple, green and red shading give the piece a vivid, glossy finish against a black background.

Neo-trad Other Eye Triangle Rose Banner Serpent Snake Book Smoke Gem Cloud

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Ada Thewlis had been polishing the same brass clasp for a week before she admitted the book was locking itself. It sat in the back room of her pawnshop on Kirkgate, between a tarnished cornet and a box of unmatched cufflinks, and every morning the clasp was fastened tighter than she had left it. The rose she kept in a jam jar on the sill had wilted overnight, its petals curled black at the edges, and a thin grey smoke leaked from the spine like breath on a cold window.

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Her nephew Col came in on the Thursday with a dealer's card from Harrogate and a face that said he had already spent the money. He wanted the book gone before the Christmas rush. He turned it over in his hands and said the cover was warm, which Ada had not wanted to hear, and the green serpent stamped into the leather seemed to lift its head towards him. Col laughed it off and went out whistling. Ada noticed the bell over the door rang twice.

That night she opened the book at last. The frontispiece showed an open eye inside a triangle, weeping a single drop of ink, and every page after was a list of names. Some were crossed through in red. Near the back she found her own name, written in a hand she did not recognise, and beneath it, still wet, her nephew's.

She did not sell it. She wrote a line in pencil on the flyleaf, struck out both names, and pressed the clasp shut with her thumb. In the morning the rose on the sill had opened fresh and red, and the serpent had coiled itself neatly beside the till, watching the door.