Black and grey realism tattoo of Medusa in profile, with snake hair and an ornate helmet, on the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Medusa in profile with snake hair on upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A woman in profile is shown with snakes forming her hair and an ornate, helmet-like headpiece with raised circular details. The snakes and headpiece are outlined with fine, crisp linework, while the face and shoulders are softly shaded in greys. The design is entirely black and grey and is centred on the skin with the figure's bust fading into the lower part of the composition.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The band at the Palais has given up on the foxtrot, so you sit at the far end of the bar with your back to the mirror ball, counting coins in your glove. Nobody asks you to dance anymore. Not since the sailor from Greenock looked too long at you over the rim of his glass and went grey from his boots upward, and Jimmy on the door swore his cigarette crumbled to chalk between his fingers. Your aunt riveted the brass band to the tin helmet from the war, and you pin the snakes beneath it each evening with hatpins, one by one, until the hall feels a little less like a held breath.

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Then comes Tuesday, and a piano tuner called Lachlan Reid, who has come in from the rain with a tuning fork in his breast pocket and his eyes fixed on a point just past your shoulder. He never looks at your face. Instead he asks you to face the mirror, because a mirror, he says, is the only honest way to meet a gorgon, and anyone who insists on looking straight at one deserves what they get. You laugh before you can stop yourself, and the snakes shift under the brass with a sound like wet paper.

He holds out his hand and you take it. The band plays something slow and out of tune, and Lachlan corrects it under his breath, humming the true note against the drummer's brushes. In the long glass you see the room break into a thousand grey pieces, the dancers blurred into smoke, and at the centre a woman with a crown of serpents who is not turning anyone to stone tonight. At the last chord he tips his head and says the snakes are keeping time with him. For once, you let someone look.

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