Black linework tattoo of a snake eating its own tail in a circle around a hexagon with inner double lines, on plain skin.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ouroboros snake around a hexagon

Geometric · Black and grey · Photo

A snake biting its own tail forms a circle around a hexagon with alternating double lines inside, resembling a benzene ring. The snake body is drawn in bold black outline with segmented scale marks, while the hexagon is a clean, unshaded outline. The design is in black ink only and is centred on a plain area of skin.

Geometric Snake Hexagon Circle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Under the platform at Thornley Cross there lived a snake that had bitten its own tail, and it had lain so long that the rails grew over it like moss. Nobody saw it, but every signalman knew to listen for the tick of it in the points when the weather turned.

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Tom Abbott came to the box the winter his father died. He was nineteen and quick with figures, and he did not believe in snakes. He drew the junction on the back of a timetable: six roads meeting at one ring of sidings, each joined to the next by a double track, so that a train could go round and round and come back to where it began. His schoolmaster had called it the shape carbon likes to take, and Tom liked that far better than any story about serpents.

One night a goods train stood on the loop with its brakes off and no driver aboard. Tom walked the sidings with a lamp and found the levers pulled wrong, each one turned the way a head turns to look back at its own tail. He could hear the thing breathing under the sleepers, slow and patient. He did not run. He took the chalk from his pocket, drew a ring on the boards, then a hexagon inside it, and threw every lever back in order around the six roads until the points settled and the loop went quiet.

In the morning the stationmaster asked who had moved the goods. Tom showed him the drawing. "Every line you ever run comes home to where it started," the old man said. "That's all the snake wants you to know." Tom kept the chalk ring on the wall of the box for thirty years, and nobody ever rubbed it out.