Traditional tattoo of a shaded skull with a green cobra and a second snake coiled around it, with red drips, on a forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skull with cobra and snake on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A large skull fills the centre of the design, with a green cobra rising above it and a second snake coiling across its lower jaw and around the bottom. Bold black outlines and black shading give the skull depth, while the snakes use red, yellow and blue detailing. The tattoo sits against a plain light background, with red drops falling from the cobra's head and the skull.

Traditional Forearm Skull Snake Blood drop

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cobra got out during the quickstep, which is the only dance nobody in Rhyl can do sober. Dolan had brought it in a hatbox, swearing it was only a grass snake dressed up for the season, and when the saxophone hit the high note it rose out of the lid like a bad idea. Mrs Pargeter screamed, the bandleader kept playing because he was paid by the hour, and I stood by the cloakroom with a brass tag in one hand and a tea towel in the other.

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Dolan wouldn't go near it. He had the sense to stand on a chair and point. I crossed the sprung floor in my good shoes, slow as a Sunday, and the thing turned its hood towards me as if it had been waiting all evening for someone sensible. Its red tongue flicked the air. A bead of something dripped from the corner of its mouth onto the parquet, right beside the black tiles that had been laid in the shape of a grinning skull when the place was built, and I thought of my mother telling me that snakes only strike what they take for trouble.

I didn't strike it with anything. I lowered the tea towel and let the thing find the cotton and the warmth of my wrist, and it poured itself down my arm in one cool, yellow-banded rope. The band stopped. Somebody clapped. Dolan climbed off his chair and asked if I'd care for a dance, and I said I'd rather he put the snake back in its hatbox and fetched my coat from the hook where he'd left it.

Behind me, through the open doors, the sea was doing what it always does, going out and coming back for the same stones.