Traditional-style flash drawing of a green snake coiled around a cream banner that reads Tunnel Snakes Rule, set on a plain green background.

Green snake with Tunnel Snakes Rule banner

Traditional · Colour · Flash

A green snake with a yellow-striped belly coils through the image, its head raised with an open mouth and forked orange tongue. Bold black outlines define the scales, which are shaded with lighter highlights and darker green. A cream banner with black lettering crosses the lower half of the snake, and the plain green background fills the rest of the frame.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Mags,

Keep reading

The boat is still tied up in the cut below Sallow Hill, and I have not got over the tunnel yet. Dad says I am making a fuss, but you were not there when the lamp went out halfway through and the water started talking back to us. Something was sliding along the roof of the cabin, long and green and patient, and Tom swore blind it was a drowned lock-keeper's conscience. I say it was a snake. Nobody believes a girl who has been counting bricks for an hour.

Now here is the thing. Tom chalked a banner on the tunnel wall, big as a bedsheet, with a snake curling under it. TUNNEL SNAKES RULE. Dad went spare because the Trust will want the bricks scrubbed. But the next morning there was a second banner underneath, in different writing, saying the snake agreed. Who wrote it, nobody will say.

I am sending you a pressed fern and a bit of the chalk, which I scraped off with my thumb. Keep it somewhere dry. Tom says the snake only comes out for people who are going to be fine, and I have decided to believe him, mostly because it makes the tunnel less frightening.

Write soon. Mind the lock gates at Hollin.

Love, Essie

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