Black traditional-style tattoo of a skull with a serpent coiling down the forearm, ending in a small skull at the tail.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skull and serpent on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A black ink tattoo shows a skull at the top left with a snake wrapping around it and coiling down diagonally across the arm. The snake ends in a smaller skull, and the thick outlines are filled with solid black ink. The image is a close, straight-on view of the arm against plain pale skin with a dark background at the edges.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Brother Aldous had carved the skull into the lid of the reliquary box forty years before the abbey roof was re-leaded, and the novices still touched it for luck when they passed the cloister door. Tobias, sixteen and newly arrived from a Lincolnshire fen farm, thought the thing ugly. He said so while they scraped lichen from the north wall of the infirmary garden.

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"It is meant to be ugly," said Brother Aldous from the bench, not looking up from his rope. "A skull without a snake is only a fact. The snake is the question: what does a man do with the fact?"

Tobias did not know, and said so. The old monk nodded as though this was the first sensible answer he had heard in a month. He told him about the serpent that had lived under the old well, how the lay brothers had fed it bread until it grew too fat to fit back through the grate, and how they had all agreed it was a sign of something, though no one could agree what.

On the last morning of the lichen work the bell did not ring for matins. Tobias found Aldous sitting by the well with the reliquary open on his knees. Inside, beside a folded psalter, lay a strip of soft leather the length of a forearm and a pencil drawing of a coiled snake, its tail ending in a tiny skull.

"Finish what I started," the old man said, and handed him the ink.

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