Black and grey blackwork tattoo of a reclining figure with striped patterning, a coiled snake and feathered wings across the stomach.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Reclining figure with snake and wings on stomach

Blackwork · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A reclining figure with striped markings lies across the lower torso, partly wrapped by a thick snake and with feathered wings spreading to one side. The linework is bold and solid with heavy black fills and fine grey detailing on the wings. The image is in black and grey and is cropped tightly around the belly, with a dark top and grey waistband framing the tattoo.

Blackwork Other Figure Snake Wing Stripe

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The stone was still warm from the kiln when Aristo told me the snake would come for the wings before the tiger did. I did not believe him. I was twelve summers in the workshop at Miletus, grinding pigment for other men's gods, and I had never seen a snake that wanted anything but a dry stone to lie on.

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The commission was a sleeping sphinx for a merchant's tomb, a striped beast with a woman's face turned to the sky. Aristo cut the stripes deep so the sunlight would find them at noon. The snake he carved last, looping through the tiger's flanks like a rope through a pulley, and when he set the wings in place they spread from the shoulders in long grey feathers that looked, in the lamplight, like something that had only just landed.

On the night before delivery the snake was gone from the sketch on the wall. I found it in the courtyard, coiled in the drain where the rain ran off, its scales the same grey as the feathers. It lifted its head and looked at me the way the carved face did, patient, as though we had agreed on something without speaking.

We carried the stone out at dawn on rollers. Aristo walked beside it with his hand on the wing, telling the men to mind the feathers, and I understood then that he had made the tiger sleep so the snake would have somewhere to be quiet. The merchant paid in silver and never came to look. Years later I still count the stripes when I cannot sleep, and I still hear the drain, a long dry hiss, like someone keeping a secret for the stone.