Black ink drawing of a xenomorph-style creature seated in lotus position inside a circle formed by its segmented tail, in a blackwork style, shown as a tattoo design.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Meditating xenomorph within a tail circle

Blackwork · Black and grey · Flash

A black ink illustration of a xenomorph-like creature sits cross-legged with its hands resting in meditation poses. Its segmented tail curves around it to form a near-complete circle behind the figure. The linework is bold and detailed, with heavy solid black areas and fine hatched shading on the creature's limbs and head, set against a plain pale green background.

Blackwork Alien Circle Tail

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Baker Ivo Marsh had been up since three, and the dough would not rise. He told his boy it was the cold, though the cold had nothing to do with it. Something had been sitting in the flour store every morning for a week, and every morning the sacks had been moved into a neat ring around it, as if someone had measured.

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On the seventh morning he lit the lamp and went in quietly. The creature was there, folded cross-legged on the bare boards, its long tail laid round behind it in a near-perfect circle. Its hands rested open on its knees, palms up, the way the old priest at Hallow Cross sat when he was waiting for the bread to be blessed. Ivo stood in the doorway with the lamp shaking a little and waited to be eaten.

It did not eat him. It breathed, slow, and the flour on the floor lifted and settled with each breath. Ivo, who had no patience for anything that did not knead or bake, found himself sitting down across from it. He took a handful of yesterday's dough from the trough and began to work it in his lap, folding, turning, pressing, the way his mother had taught him. The creature's head tilted toward the sound.

They kept at it until the window went grey. When the first oven door clanged in the square, the creature rose in one smooth unfolding and went out past him without touching a thing. The circle of tail stayed on the floor, pale with flour, a ring as clean as a proving bowl.

The bread that morning rose higher than it had in forty years. Ivo never told the village, and every dawn after that he left the flour store door open a crack and sat down on the boards with his dough.