Painted Japanese style design of a green snake coiling around pink and yellow lotus flowers over dark swirling clouds, shown on a flat back torso cutout.

Snake and lotus back design on a painted torso

Japanese · Back · Colour · Flash

A green and yellow snake with a red-striped body coils across a dark background, its open mouth and fangs facing right. Pink and yellow lotus flowers with green stems surround it, and dark grey swirling cloud shapes fill the gaps. The bold, flat colours and clean outlines sit across a back-shaped cutout with the figure seen from behind.

Japanese Back Snake Lotus Flower Cloud Swirl Torso

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lotus pond behind the Halloran sisters' bakery had been drained twice since the war, and twice the snake had come back to it. You knew the snake by the red stripe down its spine, the same colour as the paint your mother kept for the shutters. Nobody in Wexcombe Lane would say its name aloud, but the children swore it sang when the cloud came down off the hill, a low hiss that rose into the flowers and stayed there.

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You were the one who went out with the lantern that October, because you were the only one who had not been frightened of it at school. Your brother said it was a judgement on the dye works. Your aunt said it was only a grass snake grown fat on frogs. You carried the lantern past the wet stones and found it coiled on the lowest pad, green and yellow, its mouth open to show the pink inside, and it did not strike. It looked at you the way the postmistress looked at a letter she had already read.

It asked you for nothing. It only wanted the lantern set down on the bank, so that the flowers could open in the dark, which they did, all at once, pink and gold, lighting the whole pond like a stove door. You stood there until the cloud came off the hill and covered the water. When you turned round, the lane was empty, and the bakery light had gone out, and your name was written in the condensation on the window in a hand that was not your mother's.