Interlaced serpent tattoo in a Norse knotwork style running down the upper arm, with dotwork shading on the scales.

Interlaced serpent on an upper arm

Dotwork · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A large serpent with an animal head at the top of the shoulder coils down the length of the upper arm, its body woven through looping knotwork bands. The scales are shaded with stippled dotwork and outlined in dark lines, with the head and neck picked out in finer detail. The ink is mostly muted olive green and brown with dark outlines, set against plain skin on a black background.

Dotwork Upper arm Serpent Dragon Knotwork Interlace Scale

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Hild had been told since she could walk that the serpent under the alder roots was asleep, and that a sleeping thing must never be woken by a spade. So when the flood took the bank below Ormsby Wood and the carters' road went with it, she was the one sent down with a lantern and a hook, because she had the steadiest hands and the least to lose.

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The roots had grown around something long and cool. She found it by its breath, a slow draught that rose through the mud smelling of wet iron. Its body ran under the earth in loops, each coil bound through the next as neatly as the rigging on her father's boat, and where the loops crossed she could see dark scales overlapping like shingles on the chapel roof. Its head lay at the top of the bank where alder met water, eyes shut, jaw resting on a knot of roots as if on a pillow.

She had meant to cut it free of the silt. Instead she sat down beside it and talked, the way her grandmother talked to the bees, about the price of salt and the miller's new dog. Somewhere in the middle of a sentence about her brother's debts, the tail lifted from the mud and laid itself across her knees, heavy and warm.

The carters got their road that spring. Nobody in Ormsby asked where the new channel had come from, and Hild never told them that the river ran a little wider around the bend now, curling past the alder like a loop of rope. Some mornings she still walks down with bread for the bank, and the roots beneath the tree are always a fraction looser than the night before.