Pencil sketch of a skull with a serpent coiling out of its jaws and looping down to a broken tail, drawn in grey shading on white paper.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skull and serpent pencil design

Black and grey · Flash

A pencil drawing of a human skull with a serpent emerging from its open jaws. The snake forms several loops below the skull and tapers to a short, ragged tail end at the bottom. The linework is shaded in grey tones, with darker areas in the eye sockets, jaw and the folds of the coils, on a plain white sheet.

Skull Snake Serpent Sketch

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The skull came up in Tobias Penrose's crab pot the week the herring failed, and nobody on Saltmarrow Quay would be the one to tip it back over the side. It was yellow at the teeth and empty at the eyes, but when Tobias set it on the net-wall a grey serpent slid out of the jaws and began coiling itself round the mooring posts as neatly as a fisher's line.

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Old Hannah Dunn, who mended nets for the harbour and had outlived three husbands, said it wanted paying. Every tide it took one thing from the quay: a lantern, a boot, once a child's red mitten. Then the herring came back in shoals so thick the boats sat low in the water. Tobias said the snake was a bargainer, and that the bargain was a story, because the sea had always liked a story better than silver.

So on the ninth night he sat on the wall with a lamp and told it about his brother Jem, who went out in the bitter squall and never came home. He told it all: the knot in the sleeve of the oilskin Jem left hanging, the cough he had in the spring, the song he sang badly at the Michaelmas dance. When he finished, the serpent loosened its loops one by one and slid back into the skull, leaving only a ragged stub of tail caught on the iron ring of the mooring.

Tobias never cut it free. At low water the gulls walked the quay wall in their bold way, but they gave that iron ring a wide berth, and when the tide came back in it sounded very like a man telling a story he had nearly finished.