Black and grey tattoo of a skull with a snake coiled through it, shown on the outer forearm.

Skull and snake on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A skull sits at the top of a design with a snake coiling down through its body, ending in a tail at the bottom. The linework is bold and dark, with grey shading on the skull and the snake's scales. The design is shown in black and grey on a forearm, with a sofa and jeans visible in the background.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind your lamp on that rail, our Tom, and sit where the draught can't get at you. Now. You'll have heard the chapel lads tell the Adder of Hollin Pit, but they've got it wrong, the way lads always do when they've not been down.

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It came up through the old Hollin seam the winter after the roof fell in, when the timber was still green and the men were still cursing the owners. It had a skull for a hood, grey as a clay pipe, and where its coils went the lamps burned blue and sulked. Walter Greave, the shot-firer, was the only man who'd look at it straight. He took a stub of black lead from his tin and drew it on the lamp-room wall so the men would know its shape before it reached them. Every man who saw that drawing went down the cage the next morning counting his fingers.

The flood came in March. Water rose up the shaft like black treacle, and the adder came down with it, coiling round the cage chain link by link until the winding gear groaned and stopped. Greave went down the last cage alone. The men heard him talking to it for an hour, though none of them would say what was said. When the pump finally cleared the level, they found the tail of the snake curled neat at the bottom of the sump, and Walter Greave gone, and his lamp still lit on the ledge beside a tin of black lead with the lid pressed on tight.

So when you go down on Monday, lad, you look for that tail first. If it's there, you're safe. If it's uncoiled, you go back up and tell the overman you've a cough.

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