White ink ouroboros, a serpent biting its own tail, forms a circle on the forearm in a close photograph.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ouroboros on a forearm

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A white ink ouroboros, a serpent biting its own tail, forms a large circle across the forearm. The body is built from a rope-like pattern of segmented scales, and the head is detailed where it meets the tail at the top of the ring. The warm skin tone and dark background make the pale ink stand out softly.

Forearm Serpent Snake Circle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The snow had been falling three days when the landlord's wife found the rope in the cellar. It was not rope. It lay coiled on the flagstones, pale as tallow, and when she lifted the lamp it turned its head toward its own tail, slowly, the way a woman turns to check a door she has already locked.

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Her husband wanted it out with the coal shovel. She said the thing had come in with the sleeping guest from the high pass, the one who paid in silver that rang false and asked for nothing but a room over the stables. In the morning the room was empty and the snow on the track was unbroken, and the silver in the purse had turned to ash.

They fed it bread crumbs and kept the cellar door shut. Each day the ring grew a little wider on the stone, and each day it drew a little tighter at the top, where the head met the tail, until the cellar was a circle of pale scales with no way in or out that anyone could find.

At last the wife went down with a candle and sat inside the ring. She told the serpent about the first winter, the flood, the child they buried in March. The serpent listened without moving. When she had finished she said her own sorrow aloud and found there was no end to it, and found too that it had no beginning either, so it could be carried round and round like a ring on a finger. In the morning the thaw came. The cellar held nothing but a band of pale salt on the flags, and the inn's accounts, which had never balanced, balanced.