Glowing UV-reactive tattoo of a skull with a serpent coiled down through it, shown in blue-white on a forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skull and serpent on a forearm under UV light

Forearm · Colour · Photo

A skull sits at the top of the design with a snake coiled in a vertical S-shape through its lower jaw and down the forearm. The linework is fine and detailed, with scale texture on the snake and shading on the skull, and the ink glows blue-white under ultraviolet light against a dark background. The design is centred on the forearm and fills most of the frame.

Forearm Skull Snake Serpent

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Pell had tied the Mary Ellen to the lock landing at Thorne before the light went, and by midnight the river was black enough that he could only find his daughter by the sound of her boots on the planks. She had the paraffin lamp in one hand and a tin of glow paste in the other, and she was not sleeping, because nobody slept on the Ouse the week the weir ran high.

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Everyone on the water knew about the thing under the weir. It lay coiled among the cold stones, a long grey serpent with a skull at its crown where the drowned had left their bones, and every flood it asked for a name. Men who gave it one were never seen again. Men who gave nothing were usually left alone, and that was the bargain the old lock-keepers kept.

Nell did not give it a name. She climbed down the wet ladder with the lamp shuttered, painted the paste along her arm, and held it out over the water until the light turned the foam the colour of a bruise. The coils lifted. Scale by scale the serpent came up glowing, and when its skull broke the surface it looked almost tender, like a thing that had waited a long time to be seen rather than fed.

It took the lamp, not the girl. In the morning the barge was afloat and the weir was quiet, and the gate posts at Thorne still shine blue on dark nights, if you care to look.