Colour tattoo of a green sea serpent with red eyes and teeth inside a block letter F, framed by blue waves on a red background.

Green sea serpent in a block letter F

Traditional · Colour · Photo

A large block letter F contains a green sea serpent head with red eyes, bared teeth and a dark open mouth. Blue stylised waves curl across the top and bottom of the letter, and the interior red fill sits between them. Bold black outlines and flat, saturated colour give the design a classic traditional look.

Traditional Japanese Serpent Wave Teeth Eye

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The serpent came up through the harbour mouth the week the salt boats stopped coming home, and Ysolde's father said it was only the sea showing its temper and nothing a village could argue with. Her brother Fennick did not agree. He had watched the red eyes at dusk and the ring of white teeth where the swell broke over the sandbar, and every night he went down to the jetty with a coil of hemp and a hook as long as his arm.

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On the ninth night the line went tight and did not slacken. Fennick hauled until his palms split, and the boat was dragged out past the breakwater, past the lamp on the headland, into water so black it had no bottom. The serpent rose beside him, green as bronze left out in the rain, its jaw open wide enough to swallow the boat whole. Its voice came up through the planks. "Every man in your harbour paints a mark on his hull," it said. "Mine is only the sea. Give me a letter and I will leave your nets alone."

Fennick had no paint but the ochre his sister used for dyeing cloth, and no brush but a strip of split reed. He drew a tall, blocky F on the serpent's brow, as square as the stone lintels of their grandfather's house. The serpent shuddered, and the waves rose up around it in curls, and the boat came loose from the hook and drifted home on the tide.

Morning came grey and the nets were full. Since then the F has been painted on every prow in the harbour, and the old women say the serpent still swims beneath it after dark, keeping watch. Fennick never learned to read his letters, but he could always find his own boat in the fog.