Black and grey tattoo of a skull with a snake coiled around it, running up the inside of a forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skull and coiled snake on a forearm

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A snake coils up the forearm with a skull at its upper end and its open-mouthed head at the bottom. The linework is clean and the shading is soft grey, giving the skull and scales some depth. The tattoo is shown against a plain pale background, with the arm filling most of the frame.

Forearm Skull Snake

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The snow had sealed the Hollin Gate road by noon, and by supper Ada Pell had stopped counting her guests. Seven sat in the taproom steaming by the fire: a carrier, two drovers, a curate with chilblains, and three sisters from Kendal who had come to sell a loom. The eighth, a thin man called Lowry who had paid in silver, was still in the cellar with a lantern, hunting for the second cask of perry her husband swore had been there since Michaelmas.

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Ada heard the boards creak above her and listened for his footsteps on the stairs. Instead came a long scrape, then the particular silence of someone who has found something and does not want to be heard finding it. She took the poker from the hearth and went down, past the shelves of bottled plums and the dead candle her mother had kept for wakes, to the place where the cellar wall had been opened for the new drain last spring.

Lowry stood in the gap with his lantern raised. Behind the bricks ran a passage of old stone, and along its floor lay a serpent of bone thicker than a man's arm, coiled upward toward a skull set in a niche, as if it had climbed there to sleep. Its jaw hung open toward the cold breathing up through the earth. "Your father's sign," Lowry said. "He painted it from this, didn't he?"

Ada had grown up beneath that painted serpent over the door and had never once thought it a picture of anything real. She looked at the open mouth and the draught coming out of it, and felt the knot in her chest loosen. "Bring up the perry," she said. "Leave the rest where it is." In the morning the road was still white, and when she took the board down to dust it, she found the paint had cracked along the jaw, as if something inside had been trying to breathe.