Black and grey Medusa head with snakes wound through her hair, tattooed in dotwork shading on the side of a torso, over the ribs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Medusa with snakes on the ribs

Dotwork · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A woman's face in profile, with eyes lowered, is framed by snakes forming her hair, with one snake coiling around her neck and a beaded necklace hanging below. The linework is bold, and the shading uses fine stippling for the skin, scales and hair. The design is entirely black and grey and fills the side of the ribs, with the snake heads curling toward the top of the frame.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Tamsin Rooke had been working lead for nineteen years when the dean asked her to look at the east window of St Aldhelm's, the one with the snake-haired woman the bishops had never liked. Half the cames had slumped out of true, and several of the snakes had split clean through at the joins.

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She spent a week at the bench under a lamp, lifting each piece from the frame and laying it on the light table in order, the way her mother had taught her with jigsaws. The face was the hard part. The eyes were lowered, pale glass shaded with a brush of iron oxide, and every time she pressed a seam flat she felt she was disturbing someone who had only just dropped off. The snakes were easier. They wanted to move, and the lead wanted to follow them.

On the Friday the dean came down with a flask of tea and asked why a saint had been painted as a monster. Tamsin said she didn't know, that the glazier had probably been bored in February. He laughed and went back up the nave. She stayed until the verger rattled the side door, soldering the last coil around the throat, a single bead of solder sitting there like a pearl.

When she lifted the lamp, the light came through the restored glass and laid a green shadow of snakes across the flagstones, and the shadow moved when she moved. She turned her back on the window and the shadows kept going without her, crawling up the pews toward the altar, and she thought that whoever had made the window had known exactly how a face looks when it has decided not to look back.

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