Black and grey fine line tattoo of a coiled snake with blossoms and leaves on the outer thigh.

Snake and flowers on a thigh

Fine line · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A coiled snake with an open mouth and fangs wraps around the thigh, with three large five-petalled blossoms, smaller buds and leaves arranged around its body. The design uses fine black linework, with the snake's scales shown as a crosshatched net pattern and the flowers outlined with stippled centres. The photograph is in black and white, with a pale fabric draped across the top edge of the frame.

Fine line Botanical Thigh Snake Flower Blossom Leaves Bud

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bus to Hollin Gap stopped at the cattle grid, and Maud climbed down with her father's tin of seed packets under one arm. Above her the road threaded through the pass like a dropped string, and somewhere up in the rocks the hawthorn was out, white and loud with bees.

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She had come for the wild roses, the old kind her mother kept in a jam jar on the windowsill, but the landlord at the inn told her the roses had gone over in the frost. What he had instead was a snake. It lay across the warm slate of the wall below the cairn, coiled twice, its scales a fine net of darker lines, and its head lifted with its mouth open as if it were tasting the wind for her.

Maud did not run. She had her grandmother's rule about adders: keep still, count to thirty, let the thing decide. She counted. At nineteen the snake unwound, slid through a tangle of bramble, and left three broad blossoms behind it, pale-petalled and dotted at the heart as though someone had stippled them with a pen. She picked one. It was warm from the rock.

Back at the inn she pressed the blossom between the pages of the seed catalogue and wrote to her father that the roses were lost, but the pass had given her something else. She did not say what. In the morning the first bus rattled over the cattle grid, and she did not look back at the rocks, because she knew the snake would not be there, and the flowers would be.