Black and grey serpent tattoo with dotwork shading and frilled fins, coiling from the shoulder down the side of the ribs.

Large serpent coiling down the ribs

Blackwork · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A large serpent wraps from the upper back over the shoulder blade and down the side of the ribs, ending in an open-jawed head near the hip. The body is outlined in bold black linework, with dense dotwork and smooth shading on the scales and a row of fin-like frills along the edges. The photograph is monochrome and the composition is tightly framed on the torso, with the tattoo filling most of the image.

Blackwork Dotwork Ribs Back Snake Serpent Fin Teeth Scale

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The crate had come off the Lowestoft train wet at one corner, and by the time I'd signed for it the stationmaster was already backing towards the waiting room. Inside, coiled in rock salt and sacking, lay something that was not an eel, though the label said so. It was as long as my arm was tall, banded in grey and bruise-coloured stripes, and along each flank ran a fringe of fins like the frills on a wet dress.

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Its head was the worst of it. Someone had wired the jaw shut in a hurry, and the wire had given. Teeth showed in a long white row, fine as a comb, and the eye was milky as a marble left out in the rain. Mr Hollis said the Yarmouth fishmonger had bought it off a trawlerman who'd kept it three days in a barrel and swore it had sung. I told him fish don't sing. He said that was what the trawlerman had said, and he'd been at sea forty years.

We had until the 9.40 to shift it, because the Ministry man was due then and the platform was no place for a thing like that. So we did what railwaymen do with an awkward load: tied it, tagged it, wheeled it down the ramp on a trolley under a tarpaulin. At the end of the platform the sea showed grey beyond the wall. The creature lifted its head out from under the canvas, slow and deliberate, and turned towards the water as if reading the timetable.

Hollis reached for the tag. I put my hand over his. We let the trolley run to the lip of the slope, and the tide took it without a splash, and nobody in the station ever filed a report. The 9.40 came in on time. Some mornings I still check the lost property book for an entry in careful pencil that reads only: Returned to owner.