Fine line white ink tattoo of intertwined snakes with scale texture across the back of a hand.

Intertwined snakes in white ink on a hand

Fine line · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

The back of a hand shows a tattoo of several snakes coiled and knotted together, with their heads and bodies overlapping across the knuckles and back of the hand. The design is drawn in white ink with fine, even linework and a fine crosshatched scale pattern, so it reads as pale lines against the skin. The rest of the image is plain, with a light background and a small strip of darker tattooing visible at the top edge near the wrist.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Nell,

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The cook threw out the last of the salt pork on Tuesday, so I have been living on biscuit and your mother's pickled onions since, which I will not thank her for. We are a fortnight out from Valparaíso and the sea has gone the colour of pewter, flat as a plate. Mr Oakes the bosun says the glass is falling, but he has said that every morning since Madeira, so I have stopped listening.

Something odd happened in the galley last night. I went down for lamp oil and found the shelf knocked over, and in the pale wash of moon through the scuttle, the flour bin had its lid off. Someone had drawn in the spilt flour with a finger: snakes, four or five of them, knotted together, their scales hatched in little crossed lines so fine I could hardly believe a finger had made them. The mate swears it was the boy, Pim, but Pim cannot write his own name, let alone draw like that.

Further along the mess table I found the same knot cut into the wood, the lines pale where the grain had been scored. I think now it is meant as a warning, or a joke, or the cook's own mark. Either way I am keeping the lamp lit tonight and sleeping with my boots on.

Write soon, and tell Father the peas came up.

Yours, Tom

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