Pencil and ink sketch of Medusa, a woman with snakes for hair, drawn on paper as a tattoo design.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Medusa sketch with snake hair

Neo-trad · Black and grey · Flash

A drawn portrait of a woman's face in profile, with her hair made of coiled snakes that frame the head and spill down the sides. The linework is bold and dark, with shading on the snakes and light hatching on the face and neck. The design sits on textured paper with a partial triangle drawn at the bottom and a finger visible at the left edge.

Neo-trad Snake Woman Portrait Sketch

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The letter came with a pressed fern tucked inside, which should have warned me. Mr Orrin Vale wanted his walled garden brought back before the spring open day, and the agency sent me because nobody else would take the job twice. I arrived on a grey Monday with my shears and a flask of tea, and found the gardener's cottage empty, its kitchen table still set with two cups gone cold.

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The garden had gone wild in the way that only happens when someone stops looking. Box hedges had split open and grass snakes basked along the warm brick, flicking their tongues at me as I passed. The old fountain at the centre had lost its stone woman's head years ago, and ivy had crept up her shoulders and found its way into the basin, so that the water looked like it was holding something back. Orrin's note was pinned to the gate in careful capitals: DO NOT CUT THE EASTERN BED. THEY ARE LETTING THEMSELVES GROW.

I ignored it, because I am paid to ignore notes like that. The eastern bed was a tangle of coiled green stems, and when the first cut went through, a dozen of them lifted their heads at once and turned towards my face, slow as sunflowers. I stood very still, the shears heavy in my hands, and understood that they were not guarding anything. They were mourning, the way a crown might, and they had been waiting all summer for someone to ask why.

I left the bed as it was. On the invoice I wrote the job as complete, with one line under it: eastern bed uncut, by request of the garden.