Green watercolour-style snake tattoo with a dark outline, coiled in an S shape with its head raised, on the upper thigh.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Green watercolour snake on thigh

Thigh · Colour · Photo

A coiled snake with its head raised fills the frame, drawn in a dark outline with loose, washed green and yellow-green fills that bleed past the lines. The outline is fine and even, while the colour is soft and blotchy, giving a painted watercolour effect. The tattoo sits on smooth skin, with the design centred and dark fabric visible at the lower edge.

Thigh Snake Serpent

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The vats at Sallow were never fully cold in my grandmother's day, and the green that came out of them was the colour of pond water at dusk. We dyed wool for the court at Oren, and the court paid in silver only when the cloth held its colour through three washings. Nobody in the valley could make the green hold. Then a serpent came up out of the mere, looking for warmth, and coiled itself on the rim of the great copper vat. When my father tried to shift it with a pole, it raised its head and regarded him as though he were the trespasser.

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It stayed a week. It ate rats and nothing else, and each morning the water had gone a little deeper, with yellow bleeding through the edges like sunlight through leaves. My father wrote to the Queen's clerk that the dye was a gift of the mere. The clerk did not believe him, so he sent a bolt of the cloth to Oren, and the clerk wept over it in the market square and bought the whole stock at twice the price.

The court sent word that the serpent was to be brought to the palace in a cage of iron. My father was too old for the mere, so I went out at night with a lantern and a basket of eels. The serpent uncoiled and looked at me with eyes like wet slate. I set the basket down and walked back without turning round.

In the morning the vats were grey and clean, and the cloth I had dyed the night before still shone. My father never asked what I had given the mere, and I never told him. I still walk the causeway at dusk, and sometimes the water holds a green so deep that I stop, and wait for it to lift its head.