Black and grey neo-traditional flash drawing of a woman wearing goat horns and two skulls, with a snake coiled around her arm, shown on paper.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Horned woman with skulls and snake flash

Neo-trad · Black and grey · Flash

A pencil drawing of a woman with long wavy hair, wearing goat horns and two skulls on her head, with a blue teardrop line below one eye. A snake coils around her arm and she holds a small orb, set against bare branches inside a hexagonal frame. The shading is greyscale with bold outlines and soft graduated tones, with touches of blue on the foliage and tattoo-style patterns.

Neo-trad Woman Skull Snake Branches Orb Teardrop

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nell Corran had sold readings as the goat-horned seer at the Michaelmas fair for eleven seasons, and she knew the crowd's tells by now: the boys who laughed too loud at the skulls on the booth canvas, the women who came back alone on the second night. The horns sat on a leather cap she wore only after dusk. Her snake, Ptolemy, lived in a cloth bag under the counter and came out for children who paid a penny to hold him.

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The orb was a glass the size of a turnip, clouded from the inside, and it had never once shown her anything she did not already know. Tonight a lad from the dodgems wanted to know whether his brother would make it back along the north road before the frost. She rubbed the glass with her sleeve and said the branches outside the ring were bare because the cold had got into them early, and that his brother was walking the long way round the bog. It was true. She had watched him do it that morning from the caravan step.

When the lamps guttered out she packed the skulls into their box and found the blue ink pot still open on the ledger. Every night for eleven years she had drawn the teardrop beneath her left eye, a small line for each reading she had given that was not a kindness. Tonight she had given only one. She dipped the nib, then set it down.

In the morning the lad was at the gate with his brother on his shoulder, both of them soaked to the knee. Nell wiped her face with a rag and watched the last of the old blue run into the wash bowl, pale as rain going down a bare tree.