Four black ink circular designs on a grey background, showing a snake on a staff, a hare, a toad and a raven on a branch, each surrounded by symbols.

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Four circular designs with snake, hare, toad and raven

Black and grey · Flash

The image shows four circular black line drawings arranged in a two-by-two grid. The designs include a snake coiled around a staff, a leaping hare, a toad, and a raven perched on a branch, with abstract symbols placed above and below each animal. The linework is fine and detailed, with stippled shading on the toad and hare, and the whole sheet is rendered in black and grey on a light grey background.

Snake Staff Hare Raven Branch Symbol Circle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The tide was out when Aunt Morwen handed me the four tin plates, and she would not let me carry them in a bag. "They knock together and talk if they're jostled," she said, so I walked the causeway to Skerrow with them held flat against my chest. Each one was scratched round with a snake wound on a staff, a hare mid-leap, a toad squatting on its own shadow, and a raven on a bare branch that watched me the whole way across.

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The plates had been her mother's, and her mother's before that, kept in a biscuit tin under the stairs of the lighthouse keeper's cottage. Each carried its marks in the same old hand: sigils above, sigils below, a little crooked, as if the cutting had been done by lamplight in a moving boat. Morwen said the snake was for the staff that stirs the bones of a field, the hare for running a fever out of a child, the toad for keeping the well sweet, and the raven for knowing who was coming before they reached the gate.

The trouble was that the island had been quiet for nine winters, and a quiet island is not always a kind one. Old Tregenza at the pier had started leaving his boat unlocked, and nobody could say why. On the rim of the toad plate someone had cut a new mark, fresh and thin, and Morwen went pale when she saw it.

So I hung the four plates on their nails by the door, in the order they had always hung, and sat up with the lamp lit and the kettle going on the range. Near dawn the raven shifted on its branch with a sound like a drawer closing. Nothing came up the path. Nothing needed to. I stayed where I was, the tin lid in my lap and my hands round a cold cup, and let the grey light come through the window onto the scratched metal until every mark stood up clear and black as the day it was cut.