Realism tattoo of Medusa with a bloodied mouth and fanged teeth, surrounded by grey snakes, covering the side of a thigh and hip.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Medusa with snakes on a thigh

Realism · Thigh · Mixed · Photo

A woman's face with bared fangs and blood running from the mouth and eyes is framed by coiled snakes, with snake heads at the top and bottom of the design. The black and grey shading gives the snakes and face volume, while the blood is rendered in red. The design wraps around the outer thigh and hip, with the figure's face centred on the leg.

Realism Thigh Snake Woman Face Blood Fangs

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lift in Harrow Court has been broken since Tuesday, so you climb, nine floors, counting the graffiti tags on each landing like beads. On the seventh floor a strip light flickers over a door someone has painted black, with a note taped to it in careful capitals: DO NOT LOOK DIRECTLY AT THE SNAKES. You laugh, because it's the sort of joke people on the estate make, and then you notice the bin bags have been split open and something grey is coiling out of them, slow and patient.

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Mrs Adeyemi from flat 74 is standing in the stairwell with a carrier bag of tins. She doesn't say hello. She says the woman in 81 hasn't come down in three weeks, that the council man was sent up and came back down white, and that the red on the landing window is rust from the pipes, probably. She keeps touching her cheek where a thin line of colour is drying. You ask what she wants you to do. She tells you nobody on the ninth floor has ever held her gaze for long, and that is why she keeps her door shut and her curtains drawn.

Flat 81 is open an inch. Inside, the hallway smells of iron and wet stone. You nudge the door with your shoe and see a woman at the kitchen table, her hair a mass of knotted cord, scaled and grey, and she lifts her face to you. You meant to be brave. Instead you look at the window, the one with the red streaks down the glass, and see your own reflection, and beside it a single open eye that is not yours.

You do the only sensible thing and turn your back, keeping your gaze on the chipped tiles as you step backwards towards the stairs. Behind you the kettle clicks off. Somewhere below, the black door on the seventh floor creaks open for someone else, and a voice you half recognise says your name, very softly, the way people do when they have been rehearsing it for years.