Realistic black and grey cobra with its hood raised, coiling down the upper arm, shown in a photo of a tattoo on skin.

Realistic cobra on an upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A large realistic cobra with its hood flared wraps around the upper arm, its body curling down toward the elbow. The scales and hood markings are rendered with detailed shading that gives the snake a three-dimensional look. The tattoo is in black and grey tones against the skin, with the arm photographed against a plain background.

Realism Upper arm Snake Scale Hood

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Pruett had let rooms at the Sandgate boarding house for thirty-one years and had never found a snake in the bath, so when the new lodger in number nine asked whether the pipes ran warm enough for a creature raised in Madras, she said only that breakfast was at half seven and that he would wipe his boots.

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The creature was called Dolores, after a barmaid in Folkestone, and it lived in a wicker hamper under the bed, packed with newspaper damp from the scullery. Each evening he knelt beside it and talked low, the way Mr Pruett once talked to the bread oven before a bake. The wind came off the Channel through the loose sash and set the brass cruet rattling on the landing. When the lid lifted, the hood spread wide and flat as a fan, the markings on its back like spectacles drawn in ink, and Mrs Pruett, who had not been frightened of anything since 1931, found she wanted to take a step back onto the stairs.

On the last Saturday of August he came down with his bag and his hat and asked her to bring the bill to the parlour. Mrs Pruett set it beside the teapot and waited for him to pay. He did not. Instead he left the hamper lid on the hall table and went out into the rain without looking back, and the house settled into its ordinary creaks.

She found the skin on the windowsill of number nine the next morning, coiled like a stocking drawn off in one piece, paper thin and still holding the shape of every scale. She did not throw it away. She put it in the cruet drawer beside the spoons, where it lay all winter, and on wet mornings she opened the drawer to check it was still there.