Black and grey pencil and ink drawing of a Medusa figure with snake hair, a clawed hand and a skull, drawn on tracing paper as a tattoo design.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Medusa and skull tattoo design on tracing paper

Black and grey · Flash

A drawn tattoo design showing a woman's face with closed eyes, framed by snake-like hair, with a clawed hand reaching down towards a skull at the lower right. The linework is bold and black, with soft grey shading on the face, neck and skull. The design is shown on a translucent sheet with a dark background and tape at the edges, filling the frame from top left to bottom right.

Snake Woman Skull Hand Claw

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

The reunion was held in the back room of the Crown at Little Haddon, the same room where the school once served harvest suppers, and everyone agreed the sandwiches had not improved. Nobody mentioned Margaret Vane until the second pot of tea, when Denise Corby asked whether she was coming, and the room went quiet the way it always had when Margaret walked into a lesson.

Keep reading

The tale they had all grown up with was that Margaret was born with hair that moved on its own, and that she kept her eyes shut from the age of seven so no one would be turned to stone by looking at her. The boys dared each other to make her open them. Mr Hallam, the chemistry master, took her chin in his fingers in front of the whole class and told her to look at him. She did, once. He kept the old school skull on his desk after that, and some said he talked to it in the evenings, and nobody saw him at the school again after the summer term.

Margaret came in at half past eight. The snakes of her hair lifted a little as the door opened, and nobody spoke. She found a chair by touch, sat, and said thank you when Denise poured her tea, without opening her eyes. Then someone's glass tipped and rolled toward the edge of the table, and the whole room flinched. Margaret reached out and stopped it with two long fingers, careful as a surgeon, before it could fall.

Afterwards Denise walked her to the car park. 'You could have looked at any of us,' she said. Margaret said the old tale was only half true. Eyes were never the danger. The danger was in the ones who were certain they already knew what they would see. She drove off with her window down, and in the wind her hair looked, Denise said later, almost pleased.