A bold outline of a skull entwined with a serpent, applied as a temporary stamped tattoo on a forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skull and serpent stamp on a forearm

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A hand holds a white rubber stamp printed with a skull and serpent design, pressing it onto the inner forearm. The stamped mark is a dark brown, bold outline with solid fill, with the serpent coiling from the skull down towards the wrist. The skin is evenly lit against a plain pale background, with the stamp's branding visible on its side.

Forearm Skull Snake Serpent Temporary tattoo

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nell Corran cut the serpent herself the winter her father's knuckles went stiff, working a block of rubber over the cabin stove with a penknife she kept for nothing else. The skull at the top came out too round, and her father, who could not read her ledgers but could read a pattern, only tapped it against the table and grunted.

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By April the Mary Dove was tied below Stoke Bruerne lock with two hundred bricks in her hold, and the lock-keeper's boy, Tom Pruett, had taken to watching her from the towpath. He was counting too, he said, for his uncle, and his uncle's tallies came out two bricks short every load. Nell inked the stamp on the pad, pressed it to the corner of his sheet, and watched the skull come up dark and certain. "Now they'll know it was you who counted," she said. He looked at it for a long time.

The mark spread faster than she meant it to. Tom stamped every tally he touched, the carriers began stamping their own, and by midsummer the serpent was on the sides of coal boats from Brentford to Braunston, on bills of lading, and once on the shoulder of a drayman's coat. Nobody could say who had started it. Nell first heard of it from a wharfinger at Blisworth who asked whether she was the woman with the snake, and she said she was only the one who carved it.

Back in the cabin that autumn, she found the stamp had worn soft at the skull's left eye, where the rubber had been pressed hardest. She did not carve it again. She wiped the face with linseed, wrapped it in a sheet of tally paper, and put it in the drawer beside the ledgers, where it would keep its shape until somebody needed it.