Japanese style tattoo flash of a red and gold snake coiled among colourful chrysanthemums and black swirling waves.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Snake and chrysanthemums with waves design

Japanese · Colour · Flash

A red and gold snake with an open mouth and bared fangs winds across the design, with pink, blue, red and yellow chrysanthemums placed around its body. Black cloud and wave shapes with white highlights fill the background, framing the subject within a rounded outline. Bold colour dominates the composition, with green leaves and purple accents adding contrast.

Japanese Snake Serpent Chrysanthemum Flower Wave Cloud Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lane had been shut under snow for three days when the stranger came up from the valley, his boots packed white to the ankle and a long bundle wrapped in oilcloth across his back. He asked for hot water and a corner by the stove, and he asked no questions, which my mother always said was the sign of a man with plenty to hide. I was twelve and had the kitchen to myself, so I watched him unwrap the bundle on the table instead.

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It was a scroll of painted silk, and when he rolled it open under the lamp the colours came up off it like heat off a pan. A red and gold serpent coiled across the cloth, its jaws stretched wide enough to show every fang, and around its body bloomed chrysanthemums in pink and blue and yellow, each one heavy-headed as a fist. Behind them black ink waves curled up in white crests, and the cloud shapes rolled like smoke. The wind outside sounded, for the first time, like the sea. "My grandfather painted it for a fishing village the water took," he said. "The serpent is meant to keep the tide in its place. He never believed it worked."

I asked what he wanted for it, and he said a bed for the night and the snow to stop. He slept by the stove with the scroll under his hand. By morning the snow had stopped, the lane lay clear to the road, and his corner was empty. On the hearthstone a single red scale caught the grey light, and beside it lay a coin I had never seen before, stamped with a flower of sixteen petals and still warm to the touch.