Framed black and grey tattoo designs on a dark wall, showing a skull entwined with a snake and a veiled woman holding a skull.

Framed black and grey skull and snake designs

Black and grey · Flash

Two framed drawings hang on a dark wall in what appears to be a tattoo studio. The larger piece shows a veiled woman with dripping eyes and long hair, holding a skull, with a cross and chain below. The smaller piece shows a skull wrapped in a snake against a pale grey background.

Skull Snake Woman Veil Cross Chain

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The veil was your mother's, and it still smelled of camphor when you lifted it from the tissue paper on the Tuesday after the funeral. Nobody in Hallow Cross expected a girl of nineteen to wear mourning for a father who had never once said her name, so you wore it to chapel anyway, then to the post office, and by Friday the Women's Institute had decided you were odd, which suited you fine.

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Your father's skull sat on the dresser where he had kept his pipe. Dr Bellamy had given it to him in 1931 against a debt, and he had boiled it clean in the copper and polished it with lemon oil until it shone. The grass snake that lived in the shed, the children called him Mr Pennyworth, had started coming to the back step at dusk to coil across the skull's brow as though keeping watch. You did not shoo him away.

On the Sunday the vicar called about the will. He looked at the skull, then at the veil, then at the blue thread of vein at your wrist as you poured his tea, and said the parish had been generous. You asked him, very politely, whether he had ever heard of a snake that could count. He laughed. He did not finish the tea.

That night the rain came down the lane in sheets. You sat by the window with the skull in your lap and watched the lamp in the vicarage go out one window at a time. In the morning the church bell rang once, badly, though nobody had touched the rope. You walked out to the lane with the veil over your face and Mr Pennyworth looped over your shoulder like a stole, and waited for the village to come and see what the widow had decided.