Black linework tattoo of a skull with a serpent coiled beneath it on the forearm, in a traditional style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skull and serpent on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A skull sits at the top of a serpent that coils into loops and trails down the forearm, ending in a small open-jawed head. The design uses bold black outlines with hatched shading on the skull and the serpent's scales. Only black ink is used, shown on pale skin against a plain green background.

Traditional Forearm Skull Snake Serpent

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The eel-wives of Corrin Mere had a saying that a skull sleeps best with a snake for a pillow, and I believed it until the autumn my father went down the mere after the bishop's ring and came up without it. Instead he had a grey skull in his net, its jaw wrapped in river weed, and he set it on our kitchen table like a loaf he meant to sell. Mother screamed. I only wanted to know whose it was.

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Nobody in Corrin would say. The reeve claimed it belonged to a drowned queen of Hesk, the priest called it a thief's trophy, and the eel-wives swore it had lain under the sluice gate for three hundred years, waiting for someone clumsy enough to disturb it. I carried it to the cooper's loft where the light was good and found, cut into the bone above the left eye, a serpent so fine I had to hold it to a candle. It looped the skull three times and let its tail run away into the seams of the wood.

I might have left it there. But that winter the sluice began to hum, a low note like a wet finger on a glass, and the eel-wives stopped counting their catch. On the longest night I took the skull to the gate, set it on the stone lip and waited. The water rose black and polished, and out of it slid the serpent itself, a length of dull silver as thick as my wrist, its small open jaw working. It made no sound. It only turned its head toward the skull and let its coils loosen.

I did not wait for the morning bell. I tipped the skull off the lip and watched it sink, the snake unwinding after it like a line paying out from a wrecked boat. When the mere went still, my father's net lay folded on the stones, dry as bread. He never asked where the skull had gone. I think he knew it had only been lent.