Black and white flash design of a skull with a snake coiling through it, drawn in bold linework with no body placement shown.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skull and snake tattoo design

Black and grey · Flash

A bold black and white drawing of a human skull with a snake wrapped around it and looping down the design. The snake has a patterned, scaled body and its tail curls at the bottom. The linework is thick and solid, with white highlights and a plain background.

Skull Snake

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dearest Ysolde, the frost came early to Harrowmere this year and the crypt under St Ellic's has flooded twice since Michaelmas, so I have spent a week up to my knees among the dead of the Vane dynasty. You will laugh, but the old king's skull is the strangest thing I have ever lifted. Someone bound a serpent of silver wire around it, looping through the eye sockets and down the spine of the plinth, and the wire has gone black with age. Each scale was pressed in by hand. The tail ends in a tight curl, like a question nobody bothered to finish.

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The chantry clerk says the serpent is the Vane sigil, and that the king wore it as a warning rather than a crest. He kept a ring of the same pattern, and the ring was never recovered after his death at Corrow Ford. I asked Brother Anselm whether a ring could be hidden inside a skull. He crossed himself and told me to mind my tongue, which I took as a yes.

So last night I took the skull to the bench beside the lamp and worked the wire loose with a bone hook. Inside the cranium, wrapped in oilcloth, lay a small iron ring with a snake biting its own tail. It was warm against my palm, though the crypt was cold enough to frost my breath.

I have not told the clerk. The ring is hidden in the bell-rope pit beneath the belfry, where Father buried the wedding silver, and in spring I shall walk to Corrow Ford to decide whether the king deserves a funeral at all. If anyone comes asking, tell them I have gone to the ford and taken my hook with me.