Realistic black and grey snake tattoo coiling up a lower leg, with cream highlights on its scales, placed on the calf.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Realistic snake on a calf

Realism · Calf · Black and grey · Photo

A snake with a tapered tail near the lower leg and its head higher up, beneath the hem of orange shorts, curves in an S shape across the calf. The shading is smooth and soft, with dark grey bands and pale cream patches suggesting scales. The leg rests on a white sheet, and the photograph is slightly soft in focus.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Right, sit down, the lot of you, and stop fidgeting with those paper cones. You want the snake story or the one about the brass band? The snake, good. Then listen, because I only tell it once a season.

Keep reading

Back when the Pavilion at Saltcombe still had its sprung floor, a travelling showman called Ezra Quill came in on the early tide with a crate of Cuban boas and a fiddle with one string missing. He said the snake could dance. Nobody believed him, least of all Mrs Hennessy, who ran the cloakroom and had a firm rule about animals in the ballroom.

Every Saturday after that the snake came out of its crate, pale cream blotches down its dark back like moonlight on wet slate, and it wound itself round the pillar beside the bandstand. When the fiddle started, it moved, slow and deliberate, coiling up the wood, then loosening, a long S of muscle and patience. The couples on the floor stopped counting steps and just watched. Ezra swore it kept time with the stamp of their feet.

The night the lights failed, the snake was gone from the pillar. Everyone looked up at the rafters, then down at the boards, and there it was at the foot of the stage, tail tapering into the dust, head raised, waiting for the next tune. Mrs Hennessy never again said a word about animals in the ballroom. She just set a saucer of milk by the bandstand every Saturday and left it there, which tells you everything you need to know.

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