Close-up of a Japanese style tattoo on a back and upper arm, showing a red and yellow serpent with a dark scaled head and orange eye among black and grey waves.

Japanese serpent and waves across back and arm

Japanese · Back · Mixed · Photo

A large serpent with a dark, scale-patterned head and an orange eye coils through the centre of the image, with a red and yellow banded body curling across the skin. Cherry blossom sprays, swirling waves and a geometric patterned background fill the surrounding areas. Heavy black outlining and grey shading give depth, while red, yellow and orange provide the colour accents.

Japanese Back Upper arm Serpent Snake Cherry blossom Wave Scale Flower Geometric pattern

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit still and mind the radiator, it bites. Down under the harbour wall, where the water goes from green to black, there lived a serpent as long as the breakwater. Her scales were grey as slate, and every one had a hexagon drawn round it, like a honeycomb somebody had stood on. Her eye was the colour of marmalade, and she used it to watch the fishing boats come home.

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Every spring the cherry trees on the cliff road shed their blossom into the sea, and the serpent gathered it up. Pink petals stuck to her back like sweets to a child's coat. The fishermen's wives grumbled about the mess, but the boats came home every night. Then one March the Mariner's Lad went out in a wind that came from nowhere, and the sea rose in curling walls, and nobody saw his boat again.

Nan Dorrie, who lived on the fourteenth floor of Harbour Court with a parrot and a cupboard full of unopened letters, went down to the wall with a bucket of blossom she had pinched from the cliff road. She did not ask the serpent for anything. She emptied the bucket into the water and said the boy's name three times, the way you call a cat in at teatime. The coil rose, slow as a lift, and set him on the stones, wet and furious and alive.

The lift in Harbour Court has been broken since before your mothers were born, so mind the stairs on the way down. And when you walk past the wall, take a handful of blossom from the cliff road and say the name of whoever you miss. She keeps count.