Black and grey pen drawing of a human skull wrapped in coiling snakes, shown as a tattoo design without a body placement.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skull entwined with a snake, pen drawing

Black and grey · Flash

A detailed drawing of a human skull with a snake coiled over its crown and another wrapping around the jaw, with a tail hanging below. The linework uses fine hatching and stippled shading to build volume in the skull, eye sockets and scaled bodies of the snakes. The design is rendered only in black and grey ink on a pale background, centred on the page.

Skull Snake Teeth

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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

The lamp had been dark for eleven minutes when you found the sketchbook in the chart drawer, under a tin of barley sugar and a bent spoon. Abel Teague had kept the Scarrow light for thirty-one years, and every page held the same thing: a skull drawn again and again in ink so fine it looked like frost on glass. Snakes wound over the crown of each one, their scales hatched row by row, tails dropping off the bottom edge.

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Tide's only a serpent with manners, he had written under one. You laughed at that the first week, when the wind came off the Farne side and rattled the gallery rail like someone wanting in. You stopped laughing the night the Mary Ellen Hogg went onto the reef. You climbed the iron stairs with the flare gun, counting two hundred and fourteen steps because counting kept your hands from shaking. Below, the water drew back from the rocks in long grey coils, then pulled them tight again.

In the morning the crew were gone, and the only thing left on the Stack was a skull, bleached and whole, lodged in the weed at the foot of the landing. Its jaw was clenched around a length of rope. You did not touch it. You went up, wound the clockwork, and when the beam swung out over the water you took up the pen and drew it, the way Abel had, one fine line after another.

By dawn the page was full. You had given the skull two snakes, one over the brow and one round the jaw, and left a tail hanging off the paper's edge, just as he always did. Then you shut the sketchbook and put it back under the barley sugar, and the light went on sweeping the dark, slow and patient, as if it had never once wanted anything back.