Black and grey realism tattoo of a shaded skull with a snake coiled around it, on the side of a person's ribs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skull and snake tattoo on the ribs

Realism · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A shaded skull with a snake wrapped around it and coiling down towards the lower left. The skull has soft grey shading and fine detail in the eye sockets and teeth, while the snake is outlined and shaded in dark grey. The tattoo sits on bare skin at the side of the torso, with a hand and grey top visible at the top of the frame.

Realism Ribs Skull Snake

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Now, you'll want the rest of it, and the rest is the snake, so sit down and stop fidgeting with that lemonade. Old Jory Trewin kept a skull in the window of his chandlery on Fish Strand, a yellowed thing he'd lifted from the sand at Porthkennack after the Mary Ellen broke her back on the reef. Nobody came to claim it. The parish clerk wrote it down as a sheep's, then thought better of it and wrote nothing at all.

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The snake arrived the spring the herring failed. It was no sea snake, mind, for those don't climb. It came up through the drain grate with its tail still dripping from the harbour, and it wound itself round that skull the way a warp goes round a bollard, snug and proper. Jory swore it was keeping the thing warm. His wife said it was keeping the skull for itself, because a creature that's come up out of the cold water wants something to look at while it thinks.

Every night after that, the skull was gone from the window and the snake with it. Every morning the skull was back on its nail, and a wet trail ran from the chandlery door down the cobbles to the slipway, where the tide had washed it clean. Jory stopped locking the door. He said a man who keeps a bargain with a snake has no business bolting things.

So when you see the gulls keeping off the chandlery roof, you'll know the skull is still out there somewhere, and so is the snake, and neither of them is in any hurry to be found.