Black linework drawing of Medusa with snake hair and a pale teal wash, a design suitable for a neo-traditional tattoo.

Medusa with snakes, drawn design

Neo-trad · Mixed · Flash

A drawn tattoo design of a woman's face framed by coiled snakes, with a crystal-like shape at the crown and a scalloped, feather-like collar below. The bold black linework has dotted and stippled detail, with a faint teal and grey wash across the paper. The composition is centred and fills the sheet, with swirling flourishes at the base.

Neo-trad Snake Woman Face Flourish Crystal

Find an artist for this

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 cook aboard the Ellen Crane had hair that stirred whenever the wind came round to the north, and the crew would not take bread from her hands until she had bound it back with a length of tarred twine. Nobody on the herring boat remarked on it after the first week out of Scarborough. A ship that spends eleven months in the cold learns to keep its opinions down in the bilge with the other rubbish.

Keep reading

Her snakes were grey-green as the sea under cloud, and they coiled from her temples to her shoulders like rope on a capstan. In the galley she kept a copper pan of brine on the stove, and at dusk they slid down into it and rested there, their tails curling against the rim. The cook said they were only eels that had lost their way and liked warm water better than the Dogger Bank did.

Thomas Rudd, the mate, had a habit of staring at whatever he disliked until it looked back. One night in a gale he came into the galley and told her to stop feeding the creatures off his stove. She did not argue. She lifted the pan and held it out to him so he could see the water, and in the dark surface he saw the sea rising behind his own face. He sat down at the table with his hands flat on the wood and did not get up until the watch changed, too stubborn to look anywhere else.

When the Ellen Crane came back into the Humber that autumn, the mate was the first man down the gangway, and he carried a copper pan of brine under one arm. Nobody had told him the cook was staying aboard, and he never did ask.