Black and grey Medusa head tattoo with a weeping face and coiled snakes in fine line and dotwork shading, on the outer thigh.

Medusa head with snakes on a thigh

Dotwork · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A woman's face with downcast eyes and tear tracks is framed by coiled snakes and flowing strands of hair. The linework is fine and clean, with stippled dotwork shading across the cheeks, brow and hair. The tattoo is shown in black and grey on the outer thigh, with the head centred and the snakes curling outward around it.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Brother Anselm,

Keep reading

The abbot has taken the Ovid from me, so I write this in the margin of my own hand, which is the only paper I still own. You will remember the Gorgon page from the old exemplar at Sankt Ruprecht. Its painter gave her a face that was sorry for itself, eyes turned down as if the snakes were a sentence she had been handed and was too tired to appeal. I copied the snakes well enough. I could not copy the eyes. Every time I drew her lids, my pen wept a little ink onto the vellum, and I scraped it away, and it came back.

Yesterday Brother Osric caught me at it and laughed, which he has not done since Lent. He said I was making a saint of a monster. I told him Ovid never said she was cruel, only that she was turned to stone by a god who wanted her to be looked at and never seen. He said that was a sermon, and I should keep it for chapter.

So I have stopped trying to make her frightening. I have given each snake its own small shadow, stippled in dots the way the old glassmakers shaded their leading, and let the hair fall in long strands that the wind from the cloister door keeps lifting. When I finished the last curl at vespers, the light through the west window lay across the page and the face looked up at me, not ashamed, just waiting to be finished.

Send me word whether the abbot allows the page to go to the binder. If he does not, I will keep it under my habit, where the cold can't reach it.

Brother Lucan

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