Realistic brown snake tattoo being worked on a forearm, with the artist's gloved hands and tattoo machine visible.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Realistic snake tattoo on a forearm

Realism · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A coiled snake with a scaled body is tattooed along the forearm, with its head on the left and its tail curling to the right. The linework is fine and the shading is smooth, with dark brown and black areas giving depth to the scales. The snake is rendered in warm browns and tans, and the artist is partway through the session, with gloved hands and a tattoo machine visible.

Realism Forearm Snake Scale Coil

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Pass the bottle over, and mind the gutter, it's still slick with last night's mackerel. Right. You want the snake, then you'll have it the proper way. Not the one Dennis Pollard swore blind he saw in Newlyn, the real one, the one that rode up out of the hold of the Ellen Mary in the spring of 1957, coiled in a sack of tarred hemp we'd bought off a Lisbon man who said nothing alive had ever touched it.

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The bosun found it first, down among the ice slush where the warm had got in through the hatch. Brown as old teak, banded dark along the back like the planks of a wet hull, and it lifted its head at him as if he were the one who'd come aboard uninvited. Nobody believed the skipper's tale when he came up the ladder white as gull dung. Every morning after that the coil was a little looser, a little further along the rail toward the wheelhouse, and by the time we raised the Scillies it had wound itself round the stay like it owned the rigging.

Pollard, who had hands like salt cod and about as much patience, decided it would stay. He fed it sprats from the culling box and it took them gently, one at a time, never once snatching. It liked the brass of the compass binnacle, the warm lee of the engine housing, and the sound of the bell. And when the wind backed round to the south-west, it would lift its head toward the bow and hold there, steady as a lookout, as if it knew which way the land lay.

The Ellen Mary went down on a February night off the Bishop, the sea so black you couldn't tell it from the sky. We took to the punt with two lanterns and a bucket. In the grey before dawn Pollard swore he saw the snake swimming in the lee of us, head up, keeping pace with the oars, and when the lifeboat found us it was gone. Some nights out past the Bishop you'll see a dark coil turning slow over the wreck. So tie your sea-boots tight and keep a bit of tarred rope about you. Now get that bottle back here.