Traditional colour tattoo of Medusa with teal and yellow snakes wrapped around her head, on an upper arm.

Medusa portrait with snakes on upper arm

Traditional · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A bold colour tattoo shows a woman's face framed by a mass of dark hair and snakes with teal bodies, yellow spots and red tongues, representing Medusa. The bold black outlines, flat fills and pink cheeks are typical of a traditional style, with a crescent earring and a striped background below the head. The design wraps around the upper arm and shoulder, filling much of the frame.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nine days out of Valparaiso the swell dropped to nothing, so the crew had nothing to do but watch each other. Jonah Teague came to my bunk on the ninth night with his wages folded in his fist and asked for a woman's face on his shoulder. Not a pinup, he said. Something that would look back.

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I had a needle roll, a bottle of lamp black and three colours I'd traded off a Genoese barber for a bottle of rum. I drew her first on the back of a chart, the way my old master taught me: hair like weather, a crescent moon hanging from one ear because the moon pulls the tide and the tide pulls men home. Then the snakes. Teal bodies, yellow spots like coins, red tongues flicking at the air. Jonah asked why snakes. I told him a woman with a face like that has to be guarding something.

Two nights of work and the thing took shape. The mate came down to watch and said it was bad luck to put a Gorgon on a living man. Jonah laughed at him. Then, under the lamp, he went quiet, because the pink of her cheeks had started to match the sunsets we'd been running from all week, and her eyes, which I had made pale and wide and faintly sideways, seemed to follow whoever stood nearest.

On the last night I finished the striped water beneath her chin and wiped the needle clean. Jonah sat up and turned to the porthole. The sea outside was black and perfectly still. He said, very softly, that he could feel her watching the ship's reflection in the glass, and that he did not want to be the first to turn round.

We raised Falmouth a fortnight later. He was first down the gangway, and he never once looked back at the water.

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