Small black and grey tattoo of a skull entwined with a snake on the inner forearm of a person holding a wand.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skull and snake tattoo on forearm

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small tattoo of a skull with a snake coiled around it sits on the forearm of a person wearing a dark t-shirt and striped tights. The design uses fine outlines with soft grey shading and no colour. A wand rests diagonally across the upper part of the frame, and the arm is shown against a dark wooden floor.

Forearm Skull Snake

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The fair came to Harrow Clay the week the bears were sold for their hides, and by the first frost only four wagons stood on the green. Old Mabry Tull kept the snake. Nobody else would feed it. It was a grey adder as long as a man's arm, and it lived in a willow basket with a skull painted on the lid, so the children who came to look knew to speak quietly.

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Mabry had been a conjuror once, with a hazel wand she used to make pennies vanish from the eyes of farmers. The wand had gone into the river years before. What she still had was the serpent trick: lift the lid, let the adder coil up her wrist as if it had grown there, and say the old words her mother taught her. Nobody asked what the words meant. They paid their two pence and went home lighter in the pocket and heavier in the head.

In November the showman, a loud man called Rupert Fenn, sold the caravans to pay the drovers. He came to her wagon at dusk and said the snake would fetch a fortune from a collector in Leeds. Mabry said nothing. She sat with the basket on her knees until he gave up and left. Then she unlatched it, and the adder slid out over the threshold, down the wet steps and into the long grass. Mabry laughed for the first time that year.

By morning the wagon was empty but for the painted skull on the lid. Fenn searched the hedges with a lantern until his boots filled with water, and he never found the snake. Years later a boy from the village swore he saw it sunning on the old fairground stones, its coil drawn tight, as if it were waiting for someone to come back and call it by name.