Black outline tattoo of a skull with a snake coiling around it, on the forearm, in a traditional style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skull and snake on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A bold black outline tattoo shows a skull at the upper left with a snake whose body loops through and around it, ending in an open-mouthed head at the lower right. The linework is heavy and even, with little shading, so the design reads as flat black ink on pale skin. The composition runs diagonally across the forearm against a plain background.

Traditional Forearm Skull Snake

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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

The skull came up in Jack Pell's shovel on the third Monday after the roof fall at Hartwell Drift, grey as wet chalk, with a black crust in the eye sockets that he scraped out with his thumbnail. Nobody on the back shift wanted it. Old Harry Vane crossed himself with the wrong hand and said it belonged to whoever had been first down the coal before the company had a name on the gate.

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Jack carried it home in his tin dinner box wrapped in a sack. His mother took one look and put the kettle on, which was how she said she was frightened. She knew the story: the Worm that lived under the seams, that wound through the old headings like a length of cable and took one man a year for its supper. Her own father had left coins at the stairhead every Friday, and nobody had ever told her why he stopped.

That night the lamp cable he had left coiled by the door had come unwound and lay stretched across the flags toward his bed. Its end had lifted off the floor and curled back on itself, a small black mouth held open towards the skull on the windowsill. He stood a long time with his boots in his hand. Then he went down to the kitchen, took the last shilling from the tea caddy, and walked it back up the hill to the gate, where he pressed it into the mud under the wheel and did not look behind him.