Black and grey realism tattoo of Medusa with snakes coiled through her hair on an arm, shown in three side-by-side panels.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Medusa portrait with snakes on an arm

Realism · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A woman's face is shown in the centre with snakes coiling through her dark hair and over her shoulder. The shading is soft and smooth in black and grey, with strong highlights on the cheeks, lips and snakes' scales. The image is three side-by-side crops of the same arm, so the portrait is repeated across the panels.

Realism Upper arm Woman Snake Portrait Hair Pendant

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You learn early in Shell Row that you do not look at the seam-master's daughter when the cage is coming up. Her father, Tobias Keel, says the pit takes one look for every look you give it, and he has buried two brothers on that reckoning. So you keep your eyes on the winding wheel, on the grey light falling down the shaft, on the coal dust in the creases of your own knuckles.

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The lads call her Gorgon, because her hair is a knot of adders the colour of wet slate, and because when she lifts her chin in the lamproom the men go quiet. You are sixteen and sent for lamp oil. She sits on the step with a tin of pitch, snakes looped over one shoulder, a small round pendant catching the lamp at her throat. "Don't stare, Danny Fell," she says, "or you'll be stone by Friday." You stare anyway, at the pendant, which is too bright for a village that has no silver.

The roof groans on the night shift, and the cage sticks forty fathoms down with six men in it. Nobody will go into the old adit but you, because you are small and nobody else is stupid enough. She presses a shard of polished tin into your palm. "Walk backwards," she says, "and watch the water in the glass, not the dark." You crawl with the pendant chain looped round your wrist, and you do exactly as she said.

They are still alive at the fall when you reach them, blinking up at your reflected lamp. At dawn you find her on the pithead bench, the snakes asleep in her hair. "Did you look at me?" she asks. You say no. She smiles and tells you that was the trick all along, to keep your eyes on what might turn you to stone and steer by the reflection.