Black and grey traditional style tattoo of a skull with a snake coiling through it, on the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skull and snake on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A large skull sits at the top of the design, with a snake wrapping around it and its body coiling down the arm. The linework is bold and the snake is shaded with black fill and white highlights, while the skull uses stippled dotwork shading. The design is shown in black and grey on a plain skin background, with a sofa and rug visible at the edges of the photo.

Traditional Dotwork Forearm Skull Snake Serpent

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the step, the stones here are loose, and that's no bad thing, for the loose ones tell you where the old hall used to be. Sit close. My grandmother sat on this same wall and told it to me, and she had it from a man who swore he'd seen the serpent himself, though he was drunk at the time, so take it as you find it.

Keep reading

Up on the north tower of Harrowgate there was a steward called Aldous Merrow who kept the keys to every room the lord had stopped visiting. Each night he climbed to the bell chamber and set a saucer of milk on the sill for the snake that lived in the wall. Nobody had ever seen it. They saw only its shed skin, pale and dry as parchment, hanging from the broken shutter like a letter nobody would open.

One winter the lord's daughter came back from the south with a bag of coins and a dead man's ring, and she wanted the tower emptied. Merrow argued. He said the snake had kept the rats from the grain for a hundred years. She laughed and told him snakes are only snakes, and that she would sleep in the bell chamber herself. That night the milk was left untouched, and in the morning the saucer was cracked clean down the middle.

Now, what came of her I'll not pretend to know. Some say the serpent wound itself up the old skull hung over the gate and kept watch from its eye-holes. Others say Merrow took the ring and went south, and was never seen again. My grandmother always finished it the same way: leave the milk out, child, and you'll never have to ask what's been eating the mice.