Black and grey realism tattoo of a snake coiling around a hand that holds an apple, with banknotes and feathers, on the side of the ribs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Snake and hand with banknotes on ribs

Realism · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A large realistic tattoo covers the side of the torso, showing a snake wrapped around a raised hand that holds an apple-like fruit. Banknotes, feathers and soft smoky clouds fill the surrounding space, with a tribal-style pattern visible at the top left. The work uses fine greyscale shading and strong contrast against a dark background.

Realism Ribs Snake Hand Apple Banknote Money Feather Smoke Cloud Tribal pattern

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The clerk counted the notes out twice on the pithead table, and Nell watched every one of them land, licking her thumb each time as if the paper might change its mind. Sixty pounds, he said, for the roof that had come down on the number four heading, and a letter folded inside the envelope to say the matter was now closed. Joe was still underground when the company motor came up the valley road, sliding through the coal dust like a black beetle.

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She took the envelope down to the coke ovens, where the smoke hung in grey clouds over the back rows and the wind dragged loose feathers from the pigeon loft across the yard. The lads had kept racing birds there before the pit took the fields. Mr Aske's offer had come wrapped in soft words about the family keeping the cottage if they signed, and it coiled round her the way a snake coils round a branch, patient and warm and wanting something back. Above the wheel house, the old winding hand stood raised against the dusk, and she thought of the apple the widow Harker had been given for keeping quiet at the inquest, bruised and sweet, and how nobody had ever said who had bought it.

Nell fed the notes into the firebox one at a time. They curled, blackened and lifted, rising up the flue with the feathers and the smoke until the sums were nothing but a grey sky over Cwm Dulais.

Joe would come up in the morning with his lamp still lit, and she would tell him the cottage was theirs, and that she had burned the price of it.