Black and grey realism tattoo covering a full back, showing a horned demonic creature with glowing eyes, a serpent and a skeletal hand among stone ruins.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Horned demon and serpent across a full back

Realism · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A large horned creature with glowing eyes and an open, fanged mouth dominates the back, with a serpent coiling around its horns on the right. A skeletal hand reaches up from rocky ruins at the lower edge, and tall stone columns fade into the background. The work is rendered in fine grey shading with strong highlights and dark contrast, and the composition fills the whole back.

Realism Back Demon Serpent

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ferry put me ashore on Scarra Holm with a crate of lamp oil and orders to be back by Thursday, and nobody on the mainland had thought to mention the stones. They stood in a ring above the tide-line, grey columns with the sea breaking white at their bases, and the fallen ones lay in the bracken like the bones of something that had grown too big to stand. The woman who ran the shop at the pier gave me a key to the old chapel and told me not to go past the third column after dark.

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I went past the third column on my second night. The lamp caught a face cut into the stone, horned and wide-mouthed, its eyes two chips of white quartz that the islanders had polished for a century. A serpent climbed the pillar beside it and curled round the horns, and at its feet hands came up out of the rubble, one of them open as if asking for something. I thought of the crate, of Thursday, and of how no boat would come for a man who had gone mad on a rock.

Before dawn the serpent had moved. I know how that sounds. Its coil sat looser around the horns, and a fresh wet line ran down the lichen from the mouth to the stones where the bones lay. Mrs Gunn at the shop had heard the same story from her grandmother, and she only nodded when I told her. She wrapped my bread in newspaper and said the thing in the stone had been bargained with once, by a fisherman who wanted his boat kept safe in return for a name.

I gave it mine. I wrote it on the back of the ferry ticket and wedged the paper into the open palm at the foot of the ruins. When the boat came on Thursday the sea was flat as glass, and the columns stood dry and grey in the sun. The stone hand was closed around the paper now, and the serpent had gone back to sleep.