Traditional style tattoo of Medusa's head with grey snakes, yellow eyes and a gold tiara, on the side of a finger.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Medusa head on a finger

Traditional · Hand · Mixed · Photo

A close photograph of a Medusa head with snake hair, a gold tiara with a red gem, and yellow eyes, set against the side of a finger. The snakes and facial features are outlined in bold black lines with grey shading, while the eyes, tiara and small red accents provide colour. The design fills the finger width and is centred in the frame against a pale blue background.

Traditional Hand Snake

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The wasps have given up on the windfalls, which is how you know the snakes have come down from the stone wall to sun themselves. Your grandmother said so this morning, not looking up from the crate of Discovery apples on her knee, as though she were remarking on the weather. By noon the grass between the rows is full of that dry rustle, and nobody sensible walks barefoot past the old well.

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Danny Holt from the next farm has been boasting all week that he will walk the length of the orchard with his eyes open. He has a bet on it, a pound from each of his mates, and he comes past you at the gate with his chin up and his hands in his pockets, glancing at the lintel where the carved face looks down with its hair coiled and its yellow-painted eyes fixed on the lane. You tell him to keep his gaze on the bucket of water by the well. He laughs. You hand him the bucket anyway.

He walks the rows with it held out in front of him like a choirboy with a censer, slopping water onto the stones, and for a while it works. Then a grass snake slides over his trainer and he stops dead, and you watch the bucket tip and the light go thin across his face. You run. You grab his wrist and make him crouch beside a fallen Bramley, polished on your sleeve, and tell him to look at his own small reflection in its skin. You are not the stone, you tell him. You are only frightened, and that can be walked off.

By dusk Danny has gone home red-faced and quiet, and the bet is forgotten. You sit on the gatepost with a windfall in your lap and look up at the carved face above the lintel. The low sun has caught its eyes and turned them gold. You nod to it, the way you would to a neighbour who has kept the foxes off the hens, and it does not look away.