Black and grey dotwork snake coiled up the forearm with flowers, leaves and small dotted accents, in blackwork style.

Snake and flowers on a forearm

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A snake coils up the forearm, its head raised near the top of the arm with mouth slightly open. Flowers, leaves and scale-like patterns fill the gaps around its body, with a fine dotted arc and small dark leaf shapes framing the design. The work is in black ink and grey, built from stippled dotwork shading and bold solid blacks on a light, neutral skin tone.

Dotwork Blackwork Botanical Forearm Snake Flower Leaves Scale Dotted line

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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

Sit closer, the fire won't mind, and the snow has shut the pass for three days, so none of you are going anywhere before morning. You want the one about Mrs Ashdown's snake? Everyone asks for it, and nobody ever wants the true part, so you'll get the true part.

Keep reading

The snake lived beneath the flagstones of the inn's kitchen garden, near the old well, and each spring it lifted its head through the nettles to test whether the thaw had come. Ada Ashdown kept that garden the way some folk keep a grudge, carefully and without forgetting a thing. She grew foxgloves along the wall and white roses that smelled of pennies, and every evening she set out a saucer of milk, because her mother had told her a garden without a guardian is only a meal waiting for the fox.

One winter the drifts came over the sill and the well froze solid. Ada went out with a lantern and found the snake coiled in the hollow under the rose hips, its scales gone dull as slate. She did not run. She knelt in the snow, broke the ice in the saucer with her thumb, and sat with her hands tucked in her apron until the lantern guttered, talking to it about the price of flour and the carrier who never paid his tab.

When the thaw came the saucer was empty and the roses had flowered early, climbing the well wall in a ring. Nobody ever saw the snake again. But the next winter, when the pass shut and the guests sat where you are sitting, Ada's granddaughter swore she heard a hiss from under the flags, and it sounded very much like thanks. Drink up. The snow won't stop for your opinions.