Simple black outline drawing of an ouroboros, a grey snake biting its own tail to form a circle, shown as a tattoo design with no body part visible.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ouroboros snake eating its tail

Black and grey · Flash

A single grey snake forms a full circle, with its head biting into the end of its tail at the bottom of the frame. The outlines are solid black with a plain light grey fill and a few thin inner contour lines suggesting the body's thickness, with no shading or texture. The composition is centred on a plain white background with the ring filling most of the frame.

Snake Circle Serpent Tail

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

By the third week of the wet, the big top leaked in eleven places and Mr Vance kept a tin of tarpaulin patches in his coat like a priest keeps wafers. Nobody paid to sit under a roof that dripped on the horses. We were down to four acts, two clowns who no longer spoke, and Ada, who had kept the old serpent in a glass case since before I was born.

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The serpent was grey as wet slate and about as lively, though it had one good trick. Ada would lift the lid, tap the glass twice, and the thing would take its own tail in its jaws and lie there in a neat ring, patient as a bangle left on a dresser. "It doesn't know where it begins," she told me once, sucking a peppermint. "That's why it never runs out." I thought she meant the snake. I was fourteen and had not yet learned that old women mostly talk about themselves.

The last Saturday in October, the takings barely covered the coal. Vance called a meeting in the cookhouse and said we would close at Michaelmas, and the clowns cried into the same kettle. That night I carried the serpent across the wet sawdust and laid it on the centre spot, where the ring had been painted every season for forty years. Ada watched from her camp chair with a rug over her knees. She didn't stop me.

At the matinee only a woman with a pram and two boys in school caps came in out of the rain. I did the only thing I knew. I walked the edge of the ring with the serpent draped over my forearms, and when I reached the start again I set it down. It closed its jaws on its own tail while the rain drummed on the canvas, and for one held breath nobody in the stands moved. Then the woman clapped, the boys clapped, and the snake slid off into the straw. It was the last thing the circus ever gave away for free.