Black line drawing of a coiled snake with tribal-style patterned scales on a white background, shown as a standalone design with no body placement.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornamental snake design

Geometric · Black and grey · Flash

A black ink drawing of a snake coiled loosely in an S shape, with its head raised at the top left and its forked tongue extended. The body is filled with bold, repeating scalloped and tribal-style patterns, with solid black areas separated by white bands. The image is a flat, high-contrast design on a plain white background with no shading or colour.

Geometric Snake Serpent Tribal pattern Scale Coil

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bosun Mr Tully never let anyone flake down the mainsheet without watching, because he said a coil laid wrong would kink like a snake on a hot deck. Off the Horn that March we had nothing but wet hemp and bad temper, and the whole crew took it out on the lines.

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It was Ada, the ship's cat, who first found the thing in the sail locker. A length of old manila, tarred black, had been coiled so long it had taken a shape of its own: a loose S, head raised, bands of dark tar with pale turns of unpainted yarn between. Tully swore it was the work of the last carpenter, a man called Ezra Holt, who had wound rope through his lonely watches until his fingers bled. Nobody believed him, but nobody threw the coil out either.

On the night the foresail split, Holt's coil was the only thing aboard I could bear to look at. I sat with it by the lamp, following the scallops of tar with my thumb and counting the white bands, until the pattern made sense: each bite of dark a shield, each gap a breath. Tully came down, saw me, and said nothing for once. He only took the lamp and set it nearer.

We made Valparaíso in April with the coil still on the locker shelf. I left it there for the next man. Some things are better kept than carried, I think, and the sea has enough serpents of its own to be getting on with.