Colourful geometric snake tattoo made of blue, pink, orange and yellow triangles on a limb, shown beside a tray of ink pots.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Geometric snake tattoo beside ink pots

Geometric · Other · Colour · Photo

A snake coils down the skin, built from overlapping triangles in blue, pink, orange, yellow and teal. The left side of the image shows a tray of small pots filled with coloured ink in rows. The solid triangular fills and bold colour blocks give the piece a flat, graphic look.

Geometric Other Snake Triangle Geometric pattern

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Maud had been told never to open the cold cupboard, where the old pigments sat in rows of jars, but the day her uncle went to market she went straight to it with a candle and a spoon. The jars were labelled in a hand that leaned like a fence in wind: teal, ochre, rose, the yellow of a wasp's back. Behind them, coiled on the bottom shelf, lay a snake made of folded paper, its scales cut into triangles so tight she could not slide a fingernail between them.

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She unfolded it on the bench. Each triangle had been painted a different colour, and when she held it to the candle the colours bled into one another at their edges, pink into blue, blue into orange, as if the snake had been dipped in every pot at once. It was heavier than paper ought to be. Somewhere down the lane a dog barked twice and stopped. The snake lifted its head off the wood and looked at her with a single point of teal for an eye.

"You have the wrong jar," it said, in her uncle's voice, which made it worse. "Every colour you mix is one somebody else has already lost. Fill the pots or I will go hungry and you will know why." She understood none of it, so she did the sensible thing. She mixed the ochre with the rose, the teal with the yellow, and poured each new colour into its pot until the jars rang faintly against the wood.

When her uncle came home the cupboard glowed like a sweet shop and the snake lay flat on the shelf, its triangles dulled to plain paper. He said nothing. He only tipped a pinch of blue into her palm and closed her fingers over it. "Now you owe it a colour," he said, and she has been paying that debt ever since, one jar at a time.