Black and grey drawing of a snake with a geometric patterned body on pale paper, with dotted linework and small arrow marks, shown as a tattoo design rather than on skin.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Geometric snake design in black ink

Geometric · Black and grey · Flash

A snake is drawn in profile, its body filled with dense geometric patterns of diamonds, triangles and zigzags, with the figure repeated in overlapping coils across the sheet. The linework is crisp and heavily filled, with stippled dots and fine dotted lines suggesting a constellation-like map. The image uses only black ink and grey-white paper, and the composition runs diagonally across the frame.

Geometric Dotwork Snake Geometric pattern Dot Arrow Dotted line

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the lamp, Tobias, it smokes when the hull leans. There, that's the chart I promised you, the one nobody on the Halcyon was allowed to touch. My father drew it the winter before the Bramble Strait took his ship, and he never once told me what the dots meant. I worked it out myself over forty crossings, with a pair of dividers and a bottle of bad rum.

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See the dotted lines running off the edge like thread? Those are the courses the snake takes when the stars are wrong. The arrows point the way it's already gone, never the way it's coming. Every coil you see is the same serpent laid over itself, each one a little older and a little more patterned, the diamonds and zigzags building up like the scales of a thing that has swum a very long time. My father said a sailor only needs to find the head. He never said which head.

The last night we spoke, the sea went flat as slate and the only sound was the sheets knocking. I asked him where the snake was swimming to. He just tapped the paper where the stipple thickened into a dark patch and said, that's where we are, boy. Then he went below and didn't come up.

So I follow the arrows. Last week the water turned warm and the dots on the chart began to crawl. Tomorrow, if the wind holds, we'll find out whether the head is still ahead of us or whether we've been riding its back the whole time.