Colour traditional tattoo of a coiled rattlesnake over a waving orange banner reading Don't Tread On Me, with a skull and rope on the upper back.

Rattlesnake and Don't Tread On Me banner

Traditional · Back · Colour · Photo

A coiled rattlesnake with an open mouth and forked tongue rests across a waving orange banner that reads DON'T TREAD ON ME in black lettering. A rope or pole with a small bird at the top runs down the left side, and a skull sits near the lower left of the banner. The linework is bold and dark, with flat fills in orange, green, black and grey, and the design fills the frame against lighter skin.

Traditional Back Snake Banner Flag Skull Rope Bird Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dorothy Pask had the banner pinned flat across the bench by a little after midnight, and the streetlamp through the workshop window laid a yellow bar over the orange paint so the snake looked as if it had only just stopped moving. Frank Ruddock wanted it back on the wall of the Coach and Horses by Friday. His father had hung it there after the Tyseley works closed, and the damp had since eaten the middle out of it.

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She had lettered it once before, forty years ago, when her hand was steadier and the pub still had a darts team. The rope down the left side she remembered better than the lettering: hemp twisted over a pole, a sparrow perched on the top knot as if it had been waiting for a bus. The skull under the fold had been scratched in by somebody's bored brother and never painted over, and Frank had asked her to keep it, the way you keep a stain on a good tablecloth.

The snake was the hard part. Black bands on grey, the mouth open to show the fangs, the tongue forked and red as a cut. She mixed the grey twice before it sat right. Somewhere past three the bus shelter outside went quiet and the tram bell stopped, and she could hear only the brush and the radiator ticking.

Frank came in at half past five, reeking of the cold, and stood in front of the bench without saying anything for a long time. Then he said, "It looks like it means it," and she told him that was what it was for. She signed the corner small, the way her father had, and turned off the lamp before the snake could get any ideas.