Black and grey blackwork tattoo of a scaled snake, open flowers and dotted geometric lines on the outer forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Snake and flowers on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A scaled snake coils around the forearm, weaving between large open flowers with dotted geometric lines and a small rodent near the wrist. The snake's scales are finely hatched while the flowers use outlines and light shading. The image is entirely black ink and grey on a pale arm against a dark wooden fence.

Botanical Blackwork Dotwork Forearm Snake Flower Magnolia Mouse Dotted line Geometric line Diamond Scale

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ruth had counted the ceiling tiles on Ward Nine three times by half past two, and the drip line hanging beside bay four had begun to look like something that might move if she stopped watching it. Dev, the other porter, had gone down to the basement for the linen trolley and not come back, so she pushed the cold tea trolley along the corridor herself, past the laminated fire notices and the dotted red lines that marked the escape route on the floor plan taped to the lift doors.

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At the end of the ward, in the day room, somebody had left a magnolia branch in a squash jar on the windowsill. Its flowers had gone soft at the edges, pale as old paper, and a petal lay on the lino like a dropped handkerchief. Ruth stood looking at it longer than she meant to. Her gran had grown a magnolia against the back wall of a terrace in Stockport, and every April it shed its blooms onto the coal bunker and the neighbour's cat, and every April Ruth swore she would plant one of her own and never did.

Something small moved under the vending machine. She crouched and saw a mouse, ears pinned back, sitting very still among the crisp packets as if it too had been waiting for someone to notice it. "Go on, then," she said. It didn't go. It looked at her the way the night sister looked at a chart that did not add up, patient and unimpressed.

When Dev came back with the linen, he found her on the day room floor with the jar in her lap and the window open a crack, the mouse gone and the petal gone with it. "You're meant to be doing obs," he said. "I did them," she said, and for the first time all night that was true.