A coiled, multicoloured serpent with scaled body and botanical flourishes in flash-style illustration on a cream background, with no body placement shown.

Ornate serpent with botanical flourishes

Botanical · Colour · Flash

A long serpent loops across the page in several coils, its head near the upper right and its tail tip at the lower right. Each body section is outlined in dark line and filled with small overlapping scales in teal, ochre, rust and green, with pale highlights. Three sprays of stylised leaves, berries and curling fronds in similar colours sit inside the coils and at the body's edges.

Botanical Snake Serpent Scale Leaves Flower Berry Foliage Ornament

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bread would not rise that winter, and Margit blamed the damp until the night she found the serpent asleep in the proving drawer. It lay coiled among the cloths, its scales the colour of old copper and wet moss. When she lifted a corner of linen, it opened one eye the size of a currant and looked at her as though she were the one who had come in uninvited.

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She did not scream, because her mother had taught her that anything in the bakehouse before the first firing was owed courtesy. She set down the lamp, broke the heel off yesterday's loaf and laid it on the flour sack. The serpent uncoiled slowly, over the sack and across the bench, and ate the crust with a sound like someone folding linen. Then it named its price: the first loaf of every morning, for as long as the village kept its ovens lit.

The bargain was simple, and she resented it for being simple. The loaf had to be dressed the way the old hedgers dressed a doorway at midwinter, with rowan, sorrel and a fistful of blackberries pressed into the crumb. Margit disliked the mess but did as she was asked. On the third morning the dough that had sulked for a month lifted under her palms like a sleeper turning over.

Her husband, who had mocked the talk of bakehouse snakes, came down at four to find a row of loaves cooling on the sill, each with leaves stitched into its top. On the flagstones lay a ring of pale dust that would not sweep up. He asked where the first loaf had gone. Margit nodded at the shadow curled above the oven door, which was only the flue pipe, said nothing, and went on kneading.