Black and grey shaded tattoo of a feathered serpent wrapping around an eight-pointed star and a round shield, on a person's upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Feathered serpent and star on upper back

Back · Black and grey · Photo

A feathered serpent head with open jaws and curling plumage sits above an eight-pointed star and a round shield with a cross-like central motif. The body of the serpent coils down and around the lower part of the design. The linework is bold and the forms are rendered with smooth grey shading and highlights, with no colour ink.

Back Serpent Star Shield

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the bend, little one, where the road gives up and becomes goat track. My mother's mother said the serpent sleeps under that cliff with its head to the valley and its tail in the river, and every spring it wakes hungry for a promise. Do you hear the wind in the pines? That is only wind. Listen again.

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There was a carter called Tomas Ruiz who owed the lowland lord a mule, a cart of salt and his own eldest daughter's wedding dowry, all in one season. He climbed this pass in the dark, cursing, with the lantern guttering. At the top he found a shield lying in the road, round and heavy, its face worked with a cross of four arms and little studs like the eyes of sleeping birds. Beside it stood an eight-pointed star cut in grey stone, so old the moss had fled from it.

He was a practical man. He thought a shield was worth a mule. He hefted it and the whole mountain seemed to lean in and breathe. The serpent rose out of the rocks, feathers tumbling from its crest like smoke off a fire, and it spoke with the voice of his dead father. "You may keep what you carry," it said, "or you may carry what you owe."

Tomas dropped the shield. He did not know what it meant until the morning, when the lord's men came up the pass and found the cart already empty, the mule grazing peaceably in a meadow, and a fresh salt-white star burned into the ground where the shield had lain. Hush now. Go to sleep, and when you cross this pass, carry something you can afford to give away.