Teal and black ornamental snake tattoo with tribal-style feather patterns wrapping around the side of the body.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornate teal snake on the side of the body

Other · Mixed · Photo

A large snake with a patterned teal body and a black-outlined head curls across the side of the body, with its head near the lower edge of the image. Black tribal-style feather or fin shapes sweep around it in a spiral, with fine dotted detailing on the scales. Teal fills the snake and some of the feather shapes, while the outlines and the sweeping spines are solid black against pale skin and a dark background.

Other Snake Feather Spiral Ornamental pattern

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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

Put another log on, and mind the draught from the door, for I am too old to be sent out in it. You want the serpent? Then take it the way the Marigold's cook took it, slowly and with something hot in your hand.

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We were three weeks becalmed off the Horn with the water like poured lead. Nobody sang. Then one grey morning the sea humped and the serpent came up under our larboard quarter, teal as a kingfisher's back, its head outlined in black like a pen drawing. It began to wind itself round the hull, slow as a clock, and where its spines brushed the timbers they threw off long black feathers that stood up on the swell and caught a wind that wasn't there.

Captain Ruthven wanted the harpoon. Tamsin Hark, who had mended more sails than any woman has a right to, said no. The feathers were stitching the air back into the canvas, one fin at a time. With every turn of that spiral the topsail filled. She counted nineteen turns. On the nineteenth the serpent lifted its head level with the rail and looked at the cabin boy, who had been crying over a letter from his mother, and it opened its jaw and breathed out a breeze that smelt of rain on hay.

We made Valparaíso in eleven days. When the serpent went down it left one spine on the deck, teal and dry as paper. Tamsin kept it in a tin with her needles until the day she died, and if you ask me nicely tomorrow, I may still let you hold it.