Traditional coloured tattoo of a woman with bobbed black hair, a blue headband and a gold feather, framed by red and yellow snakes, on the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Flapper woman with snakes on upper arm

Traditional · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A bold portrait of a woman with dark bobbed hair, a turquoise headband, a gold feather and a red jewel in her hair, with gold hoop earrings and blue lips. Two red snakes with yellow spots wrap around the head and lower edge of the design. Thick black outlines and flat, saturated colour fill the piece, which is shown in close crop on the skin.

Traditional Upper arm Woman Portrait Snake Feather Headband Hair Jewel Earring

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The fog came in off Scarrow Point on the third night the herring boats were late, and Sadie Lusk climbed the lighthouse stairs with her hair pinned up and the red stone set in it, because her mother had always said a woman climbs better when she is dressed for the occasion.

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Her two snakes went with her, as they always did, one wound round her wrist and the other looped in the pocket of her coat. Her grandfather had won them at a fairground in Plymouth, and they knew the iron stairs better than she did. At the top the great lamp was dark and the mantle had cracked in the damp. Her husband Tom lay on the floor beside the clockwork, where the gears had caught his sleeve and held him, and he could not lift his head.

She unwound the snakes and set them on the cold brass housing. They lay there in their gold-spotted coils and slowly warmed the metal, the way they warmed themselves on the rocks in summer. Then she took the red stone out of her hair, with the little gold beads round it, and fitted it into the empty holder in front of the lens. When she turned the key the light came out the colour of a dropped cherry and went far out over the water.

By morning the fog had lifted. Tom was sitting up in the kitchen with his arm in a sling, and the boats came in one behind another under the red beam, swinging wide of the Scarrow rocks. Sadie hung the feather back in her hair and said nothing about the stone, because nobody had asked her for it, and a lighthouse keeper's wife has no call to explain where her jewellery went.