Close-up of a black and grey skull and entwined snake tattoo on an upper arm, with a wooden wand held beside it and a green dress in the background.

Skull and snake tattoo on an upper arm

Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A woman in a green satin dress holds a wooden wand with her right hand while her arm is shown in close-up. A black and grey skull with a snake coiled around it sits on the upper arm, drawn with bold outlines and soft grey shading. The shallow depth of field keeps the tattoo sharp while the background and dress fall out of focus.

Upper arm Skull Snake Wand Dress Necklace

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Brother Osric had been dead nine days when I took his rod from the cupboard above the scriptorium stairs, and nobody stopped me, because nobody else wanted it. It was a length of dark wood no longer than my forearm, bound at the grip with waxed thread, and it had belonged to the prior before it belonged to Osric. The prior used it to rap the knuckles of boys who blotted their ink. Osric used it to point at the lectern, the pew, the bell rope, the stranger at the gate.

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The seal of the house was a skull with a serpent coiled through its eye sockets and out of its jaw, and that same skull was pressed into the wax of every letter that left Saint Edmund's Fen. I had copied it into the margins of our psalter a hundred times without once asking why an order of quiet men would choose such a badge.

On the feast of the Holy Innocents I found the answer folded into the rod's hollow end: a scrap of parchment, the hand small and furious. It listed the tenants the abbey had turned onto the causeway in winter, their children's names beside their own, and beneath them a single line in the same brown ink as the seal. The dead keep the only honest accounts.

I carried the scrap to the abbot. He read it twice, laid the rod across his knees, and said nothing for so long that the candle guttered and I thought he had forgotten me. At last he asked me to fetch the red wax. We sealed the names inside a fresh letter to the bishop, and the skull went down bold and bright, and for once the serpent looked as though it meant to slither free.