Black and grey ink flash design of a scorpion inside a flask, framed by blackberry leaves and mushrooms, with the word Scorpio beneath, shown as a tattoo design without a body placement.

Scorpion in a flask with botanical leaves

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

The drawing shows a scorpion inside a conical flask with a corked top and a sunburst above, surrounded by blackberry sprigs, serrated leaves, mushrooms and small star motifs. The linework is fine and precise, with hatching and stippling used for shading on the scorpion, glass and foliage. The design is rendered in black ink on white with the word Scorpio in serif capitals and a short italic line of text below.

Botanical Scorpion Bottle Leaves Blackberry Mushroom Star Sunburst Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The kettle had boiled twice before Agnes Pell remembered the flask on the top shelf of the dispensary, behind the methylated spirit and the tins nobody had opened since the old matron retired. It was past three on the night shift at Cold Harbour General, and Lenny Fairweather, the porter, had come down the back stairs with his cap in his hands to say that the boy in bay four would not stop shaking. He was seven. He had heard the men in the next bed talking about the dark that comes after the last lamp, and now he would not shut his eyes.

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The flask had been her grandmother's. A scorpion sat inside it in clear spirit, its tail curled up like a question, the glass stoppered with a cork that had gone the colour of tea. A dried blackberry spray was tied to the neck with green thread. Her grandmother had said the creature held fear still, so that fear could not run loose about the house. Agnes had never believed a word of it, but she had never thrown the thing out either, and she did not stop to believe it now. She measured out a thimble of the warm milk the night sister kept, and she carried the flask down the corridor under her cardigan.

She pulled the chair to the bedside and set the flask on the locker where the boy could see it. He asked whether it would bite. She told him only if somebody opened the cork, and that she had the only key to that. He asked what it was guarding, and she said it was guarding the window, which was the one thing in the room that could let the dark in. He looked at the window for a long time. Then he looked at the scorpion, and somewhere in the counting of its legs, which he insisted on doing twice, his breath slowed and his hands went still on the blanket.

At six, when the grey came up over the car park, Agnes went back to the dispensary and put the flask on its shelf. The spirit had clouded. She wrote in the night log, bay four, sleeping, and under it, in smaller hand, that the cork should not be touched by anyone.