Black ink pen drawing of a snake with its head raised, knotted into a looped four-lobed shape on cream paper, with cross-hatched shading.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Knotted snake pen drawing

Black and grey · Flash

A snake with its head raised at the top forms a looping, interlaced knot with four open loops. The body is drawn with fine outline strokes, cross-hatching and stippled shading that suggests scales and depth. The design is shown in black ink on a cream, textured paper background, centred in the frame.

Snake Serpent Knot Loop

Find an artist for this

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

Mind the step, it's cracked, and don't slam that oven door or the dough will sulk until noon. Sit on the sacks, they're warm. Right. You want the snake, and the snake wants the dawn, so we'll go slow. Old Tobias Quill kept a bakery on Fenwick Lane when the lamplighters still walked it, and every night at two he shaped one loaf the same way: a serpent lifting its head, its body passed through itself four times until the loops made a little flower of knots.

Keep reading

He never let the boy near it. Milly, the girl who swept his floor, used to watch him through the flour haze. He pressed the rope of dough with his thumbs, folded it over and under, and the fine lines he scored along its back came out like scales. 'A knot's a promise,' he told her, 'pull one loose and the whole thing gives.' She thought that was nonsense. A loaf is a loaf.

Then came the winter the flour merchant cheated him, the coal ran short, and the shutters stayed down for a week. Tobias was taken to the infirmary with his chest bad. One grey morning Milly unlatched the back door and found the snake cooling on the rack, head still raised, as stubborn as he had been. She broke it in half and ate the middle while it was warm.

The crust gave under her thumb, but the loops held. She sat on the sacks and waited for the bell over the front door, and when it rang she was already kneading.