Grey line-art flash design of a rearing cobra with a diamond lattice pattern on its hood and body, shown on a plain white background.

Rearing cobra with diamond pattern

Geometric · Black and grey · Flash

A stylised cobra rises from coiled body with its hood expanded, drawn in a single flat grey tone on white. The scales on the hood, neck and coils are filled with interlocking diamond and lattice shapes, while the belly plates are drawn as horizontal bands. The composition is centred and fully isolated, with a clean, bold outline suited to stencil or tattoo transfer.

Geometric Snake Diamond pattern Hood Coil

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The crate came off the Lisbon boat with its lid nailed down and cloves leaking through the slats, and you were the only one left on Gallow Quay to sign for it. The clerk had gone home with a fever. The carter wanted his two shillings and his cart back before the tide turned, so you pressed the pencil into the docket and told yourself it was only spice.

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Inside, under the straw, lay a brass hood the size of a dinner plate, its rim worked into diamonds like the lattice on a herring net, and beneath it a coil of something that was not rope. Your uncle Teodor had kept a dried cobra in a jar in the back room of the chandlery for thirty years and swore it kept the nets from rotting. You had always thought he was making it up. Now the thing in the crate turned its head towards you through the gaps in the straw, slow as a tide.

You did not open it. You carried it up the steps to the loft and set it beneath the window, where the lamps along the wall threw diamonds across the floorboards. All night the mended nets creaked on their hooks, and you sat on an upturned bucket and listened to the knots tightening one by one.

At dawn the crate was empty and every net in the loft was whole, not a single hole left in the mesh. Outside on the wet flagstones someone had chalked a lattice of diamonds that ran from the chandlery door all the way down to the water, and the tide was already reaching for it.