Black and grey skull and snake tattoo in a traditional style on a forearm, with the snake coiling through a loop beneath the skull and its fangs bared at the bottom.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skull and coiled snake on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a human skull at the top, with a snake coiled through a loop beneath it and its head with open fangs at the bottom. The linework is bold and dark, with shaded bands and stippled texture on the snake's body and the skull. The black and white photograph shows the forearm running diagonally, with a hand at the lower right and a grey trouser leg at the left.

Traditional Forearm Skull Snake Loop Fangs

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain had been coming off the canopy of stall nineteen all morning, and I was on my knees under the trestle sorting a tin of loose buttons when the man in the grey coat dropped a tray of brass fittings onto the wet cobbles. Among them was a ring the width of a bangle, cast with a skull perched on a snake that ran back through its own loop, the fangs open at the bottom where a tail should have been.

Keep reading

He said his father had made them in a foundry in Walsall before the works closed, and the mould was the only thing left to sell. He wanted eight pounds for the lot. I gave him five and kept the ring, because someone had picked out the snake's eye with a fine punch, and in that grey light it looked as if it was still deciding whether to bite.

I wore it on a bootlace for a month, then pinned it to the corkboard above the till where the Thursday regulars could see it. Ron from the fishmonger's said it was a warning. I told him it was a price, and that was the only warning I'd ever needed on a Thursday.

He came back in October, soaked to the skin, and asked after the ring without any sign of wanting to buy it. He stood under my awning while the water ran off his hood and told me, quite gently, that the snake had been his grandmother's joke, the loop her way of saying she always found her way back through. I took it down from the board and pressed it into his palm. He closed his fist on it and walked off into the rain without once checking the stall numbers, the way people do when they already know the way home.