Black and grey tattoo of a mythical bird-headed creature with peacock-style feathers and a coiling serpent tail across the chest.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Mythical creature with serpent tail on chest

Traditional · Chest · Black and grey · Photo

A large tattoo of a mythical creature with a bird-like head, feathered wings and a long coiling serpent tail covers the centre of the chest. The design uses fine, dense linework and grey shading to build detail in the feathers, scales and ornamental patterns. The tattoo is shown in close crop on a bare torso against a dark background, with the figure filling most of the frame.

Traditional Chest Bird Peacock feather Ornament

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

You learn the net is fouled before the skipper does. The otter boards have come up with a cable wound round them like ribbon, and Dessie is swearing in the wheelhouse doorway while the wind flattens spray across the foredeck. It is four in the morning off Peterhead, the deck lamps yellow, the hull groaning under a trawl full of nothing but weed and one sulking dogfish. You go down the gutter with the gaff, boots sliding on the wet planks.

Keep reading

The bird on the bulkhead above the galley table has watched you do this for three winters. Somebody scratched it into the paint long before you signed on: a crested thing with a fan of peacock feathers at its back and a tail that coils down the wall like a rope left to dry. Old Ruari said it was for luck. Dessie said it was for the drink. You never asked which of them had the nail, and you never asked what it was guarding, though tonight you think it has something to do with the way the cable finally gives.

You put your shoulder into the block, feel the wire sing, and then it slackens all at once. The boards swing free, the net comes aboard in a rush of cold silver, and somewhere beneath the hull the sea settles back like an animal that has decided not to bite.

Later, when the catch is gutted and the others are asleep in their bunks, you sit under the bird with a mug of tea going cold and trace the curl of its tail with one finger, the paint worn smooth where a hundred hands have touched it on the way to the heads.