Black line drawing of an ouroboros, a snake eating its own tail, with swirling decorative patterns along its body, on a mustard background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ouroboros snake design

Black and grey · Flash

A snake forms a near-circle as it bites its own tail, with its head resting at the lower right. The body is filled with black ornamental swirls, spirals and small dots that stand out against the white and yellow areas of the design. The drawing is shown in black ink on a flat mustard yellow background, with the subject centred and filling most of the frame.

Snake Serpent Circle Swirl Spiral Tail

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rope in the tarred shed at Porthavel has no beginning, and you have stopped pretending to care where it ends. Your uncle wound it on the big wheel the spring the herring failed, and he told you it would run until the sea gave back everything it had taken. You thought he was drunk. He was usually drunk by four.

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Each morning you walk the ring from the shed door to the slip, coiling it over your arm the way he showed you, feeling for the faint ridge where the strands were laid. There is never a knot. There are only swirls of tar-black marl worked into the lay, little spirals where the hemp was twisted back on itself, and dots where he pushed a bodkin through to check the tension. Gulls land on it and walk in circles, unsure which way is forward.

On the morning the Mary Ann came in without her crew, you stood in the shingle with the coil over your shoulder and found the place where the rope ran back into itself. The join was perfect. Your uncle had laid the last fathom so that its tail slipped beneath its own head and vanished, and you could not have said which end was the beginning. You did not cut it. You carried the whole ring down to the water and let the tide lift it, slowly, until it lay flat on the harbour like a dropped wedding band, its swirls turning silver under the lamps.