Black dotwork and white-ink snakes coil together on the inner forearm in a blackwork-style tattoo.

Intertwined snakes on a forearm

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A forearm tattoo of two snakes wrapped around each other, one rendered in dense black dotwork stippling and the other in pale white ink with fine outlines and scale texture. The snakes overlap in a central knot, with one head pointing down toward the wrist and the tail of the white snake curling out to the right. The design is black and white only, against plain skin and a pale background.

Dotwork Blackwork Forearm Snake Serpent

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You learn a barge by its noises before you learn its shape. The tiller chain knocks against the cabin side, the lock gates at Coldharbour groan like old men, and rats run the bilge boards after dark. Your father bought the Marigold with a debt and a dead engine, and for three winters your only company was the pair of snakes he kept in a biscuit tin to deal with the vermin.

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The dark one you called Sunday, because you found her under the coal on a Sunday, and she had come up from the fens in a sack of potatoes. The pale one had arrived in a crate of Dutch onions, nobody claimed her, so she became Vrouw, which was the only Dutch word your father knew. Neither liked to be parted. Most nights you found them knotted together on the warm lid of the stove, the black body running through the white like ink through milk, and you never had the heart to pull them apart.

Then the river rose in February. The water crept over the bottom step, the tin tipped, and when you lifted the lid there was only a wet ring and a trail of scales across the brass rail. Two days later you walked the towpath with a torch and a saucer of milk, and found them on the sluice gate, the black coil wrapped round the white, both basking in the thin sun as if they had arranged it between them.

You did not call them back. You cast off, let the Marigold drift off the bank, and the last thing you saw was Vrouw's pale tail unwinding from Sunday's coils and sliding into the reeds, bright as a thread pulled from a seam.