Black and grey neo-traditional drawing of Medusa, with snakes woven through her hair and red accents, shown as a tattoo design on paper.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Medusa portrait flash with snakes

Neo-trad · Mixed · Flash

A drawn portrait of a woman with snakes forming her hair, in the manner of Medusa, with a jewelled diadem and a patterned collar below her face. The linework is bold and the face is shaded with fine stippling, while the snakes and ornaments are rendered in heavy black ink and grey tones. Small areas of red ink add accents to the diadem, collar and snake details, and the design sits centrally on a sheet of paper with pens and other sketches at the edges.

Neo-trad Dotwork Snake Woman Portrait Ornament

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

By the time the lamp-men reached the bottom of the Carrick shaft, the dust had settled so thick on the banksman's cap that Hannah Pell had to wipe it clean with her thumb before she could read the names. Forty-one on the board. Her brother Tom's was the twelfth. She tucked the list into her apron and walked back up the lane without looking at the pit wheel, the way her mother had taught her to pass anything that could hold you.

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Her mother had also told her about Medusa, a story from a book borrowed from the chapel library, about a woman whose hair was a nest of adders and whose gaze could turn a man to stone. Hannah had thought it a fine thing to be feared for. Now the manager, Mr Ashcombe, came to the back door with his hat in his hands and asked, very politely, whether she might sign the company's paper so the widows' allowance could be reviewed. He would not meet her eye. Nobody on the Clough would.

She took the paper to the kitchen table and read every line by the dying range. Then she fetched the old copper mirror Tom had bought at the Hexham fair the year before he went down, propped it against the coal scuttle, and held her own face to it. She pinned her hair tight, pressed the red ribbon flat on her collar, and waited until she and the mirror were steady enough to do what she had decided.

In the morning Mr Ashcombe came back and found the paper on the step, unsigned, weighted with a single lump of coal. He looked up at the window. Hannah stood there with her hands folded, and for the first time in his life he did not look away. Whatever he saw in her face, he did not come to the door again.