Black and white ink snakes coiled together across a forearm, rendered in blackwork and dotwork style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Intertwined snakes on a forearm

Blackwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Two snakes are intertwined across the forearm, one in solid black with stippled dotwork scales and the other in pale white ink with fine outlined scale detail. The black snake has dense dot shading and a small head near the lower edge, while the white snake is drawn in delicate linework that sits over the skin. The design is centred on the forearm against a plain light background.

Blackwork Dotwork Forearm Snake Scale

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Rain had been falling on Pennyfold market since Michaelmas, and the stallholders had stopped complaining about it. Old Mother Ashe sold ribbons under a canvas that leaked at one corner, and across the aisle a boy named Tobin sold eels from a tub of cold water. Nobody remembered how the two snakes came to the market. Some said they had arrived in a crate of rope from the coast. Others said they had always lived under the drains, one as black as wet slate and one as pale as the inside of a shell.

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The black snake grew fat on the rats that came for the fish heads. The pale one kept to the ribbons, curling through the bolts of silk and coming out with threads caught on its scales. Mother Ashe warned Tobin that the two would fight one day. Tobin laughed and said snakes did not fight over nothing. But the rain went on, the drains rose, and by the second week of November the two of them were found knotted together on the cobbles outside the stalls, so tight that nobody could tell where one ended.

Tobin went to fetch a hook to part them. Mother Ashe stopped him with one hand. "Leave them. They are not fighting. They have been trying to make one animal out of two, and that is hard work in the wet." She unpicked a loop of pale silk from the black one's neck and tied it around her own wrist. The black snake lifted its small head, looked at the old woman for a long moment, and let go.

That winter the ribbon stall sold a length of silk that nobody could cut, and the eel tub never froze. In spring Tobin found the two of them basking on the warm stones, pale and dark side by side, each wearing the other's coils like a sleeve.