Black and grey photo of a bold black skull with a snake coiled around it on the inner 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 photograph of a black tattoo showing a skull with a snake coiled through and around it, the tail ending in a curled tip. The solid black linework stands out against the pale skin, with small markings along the snake's body. The image is black and white, with the arm angled across the frame against a dark background.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lock-keeper's boy had been rowing out to the Marigold every evening since the thaw, and by February Ada Pell had stopped asking him why. She knew why. Her husband had gone through the ice below Stainforth lock, and the boy's mother had sent him out with bread and a question nobody on the towpath would say aloud.

Keep reading

Death came along the towpath the second Sunday in March, grey coat buttoned to the throat, asking after a boy who was not his to take. Ada had a grass snake in a biscuit tin, fed on milk from the galley and kept warm by the stove. She lifted the lid and offered it to him the way one offers a lodger the good chair.

He took it. The snake went up his forearm, through the gap where his jaw should hang, and coiled around the bone of him until its tail hung loose at the wrist. He tried to shake it off and it only tightened. 'It was a courtesy,' Ada said. 'You'll find it stays as long as you do, and it's never cared for stairs.'

Death went back up the towpath with the snake wound through his skull, its little tail curled at the end like a bargee's hook. The boy's rope stayed slack on the cleat all spring. Ada kept the biscuit tin empty with the lid off, and the bread still went out to the Marigold every evening.

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