Black linework tattoo of a snake with ornamental swirls and flowers running along a forearm, with a large swirling pattern beside it.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornamental snake tattoo on a forearm

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A snake with a patterned head and body curls diagonally across the forearm, its scales and body filled with scrolls, leaves and small flowers. A larger swirling ornamental design sits to the right, with its outlines continuing onto the arm. The image uses uniform black outlines and fills on pale skin against a plain, dark background.

Forearm Snake Swirl Flower Leaves Ornamental pattern

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The snow had shut the pass for nine days when the innkeeper's daughter found the snake in the cellar, coiled behind the barrels of last year's cider. It was no longer than her forearm and its head was patterned like a loaf of rye bread pressed with a carved board, every scale a little cup of swirls and leaves. Her father said it had come up the river with the timber carts and would die of cold by morning. She put it in a basket lined with her grandmother's shawl and carried it up to the warm kitchen anyway.

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By the third night the snake had eaten a dish of milk and a crust soaked in honey, and it had begun to wind itself around the wooden spoon hung by the hearth. The travellers in the common room grew bored of the weather and started wagering on it. A cloth merchant bet a silver florin it would be gone by the thaw. The old ferryman bet two that it would turn into a woman if the bell rang twelve. Nobody won, because on the ninth morning the pass opened, the carts rolled out, and the basket was empty except for a single flower pressed into the shawl, its petals drawn in fine black lines.

The daughter kept the flower in her Bible for forty years. When the river froze again she sometimes told the story to children at the inn, and she always finished it the same way. The snake had not gone far, she said. It had only wound itself into the patterns on the cellar door, where anyone who looked closely could still trace its coils among the carved leaves.