Bold black blackwork-style design of a serpent head biting a ring of spiked discs, each with a central dot, on a plain white background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Serpent head and spiked ring design

Blackwork · Black and grey · Flash

A solid black serpent or dragon head with a jagged crest and open jaws sits at the top of a ring formed from round, eyed discs joined by short links. Each disc has a white ring and a black centre, and small spikes project outward from the outer edge of the ring. The design is rendered in flat black with no shading or grey, centred on a white background.

Blackwork Serpent Dragon Head Ring Spike Circle Eye

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ring had been in the chapel crypt since before the vicar's grandfather, and nobody at Harrowgate Inn could say who had hung it there. Tonight the snow had buried the lane to the top of the gate, and Mrs Pell had lit every candle in the taproom so the travellers could see each other's faces. The carter from Thirsk kept his hat on. The young surveyor kept counting the links in the iron chain above the hearth, and getting a different number each time.

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It was the surveyor who went down to the cellar for the last barrel of cider and came back white to the lips. He said the beast on the wall of the crypt steps had turned its head while he passed, and that every one of the little eyes on the ring had opened, wet and dark, to watch him climb. Mrs Pell only nodded, as if she had been waiting for it. She told him the serpent had been bound there by a monk who had grown tired of its hunger for sleep, and that the monk had made the spikes so that it could never bite its own tail and wake.

At midnight the wind dropped. Somewhere under the floorboards something shifted its coils, and the candles bent all together towards the cellar door. Mrs Pell took down the key from her apron, pressed it into the carter's palm, and told him to lock the chapel from the outside whatever he heard. He went out into the blue dark without his hat, and the snow had stopped, and every star over the moor was blinking at once, like a ring of eyes that had just been woken.