Black and grey ouroboros snake tattoo with shaded dotwork scales, wrapping around the elbow on a pale arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ouroboros snake wrapped around an elbow

Dotwork · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A snake bites its own tail to form a full circle, with its head resting at the top of the loop. The body is rendered in fine linework with dense dotwork shading on the scales and soft grey shading along the underside. The circle sits around the elbow joint and fills most of the frame, with a partial tattoo visible at the top left edge.

Dotwork Other Snake Scale

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, sit down, the soup will keep and so will the bride's mother, who has been glaring at me since the speeches. You want a story, I'll give you one, though my own grandmother told this at a wedding just like this one, with the same thin wine and the fiddler already snoring in his chair. Listen close, it goes round, and so does everything in it.

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Long ago, in the flooded fen above Brinmoor, there lived a grey serpent who had never once been full. She swallowed frogs, eels, a drowned sheep and the reflection of the moon, and still her belly rumbled like a cart on cobbles. One dry August she lowered her head into the reeds and found something warm curling past her nose. She took a bite. It was her own tail. It tasted of very little, but it did not run away either, so she kept chewing, and for the first time the hunger had nowhere left to go.

The fen folk came with lanterns to see why the frogs had gone quiet. They found her coiled around the old stone of the ferry landing, her head resting on her own loop like a tired man on folded arms. A girl called Ada Pell, the cooper's daughter, sat down beside her and talked all night about boats and bread and the price of salt. By morning the serpent was no longer hungry, and Ada was married to the ferryman's son, who had been waiting twelve years for her to finish talking.

So when you lift your glass, think of that serpent. Mrs Cole, you may stop glaring now. I'm finished, and the fiddler has just stirred, which is the only happy ending I trust.