Black and grey Japanese style snake wrapping around two peony flowers with leaves, tattooed on the outer thigh.

Snake and peonies on a thigh

Japanese · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A snake coils down the outer thigh, passing between two large peony flowers with leaves. The snake is outlined with dense scale texture, while the petals use fine outlines and stippled dotwork shading. The tattoo is black and grey and fills the thigh from the upper leg to just above the knee, against a brick wall background.

Japanese Dotwork Botanical Thigh Snake Serpent Peony Flower Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The peonies had nodded over the lock gate since the first frost, and Nell Corrigan would not let her son cut them back. 'The snake likes its shade,' she said, which was the wrong thing to tell a boy of nine, because Tobin had already seen the creature sliding through the reeds below the sluice, black as tar and banded at the throat like old rope. Every evening after that he sat on the cabin roof of the Patience and watched it climb the stems.

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It was long and grey, scaled like hammered pewter, and it wound between the two great blooms as neatly as a girl threading ribbon through a hem. Bargemen said a serpent that drinks peony dew cannot be drowned, so the men left it be. Nell set a saucer of milk on the gunwale each night and never looked at the water while she poured.

One night the snake lifted its head over the rail and spoke in the voice of wet stone. It wanted a name, it said, for the river had forgotten it. Tobin had been told never to give his name to anything that lived in water, but he was nine and the snake was very patient, so he whispered it into the dark. The snake tasted the word with its forked tongue, then slid down the mooring line and under the gate without a ripple.

In the morning the peonies had gone from the gate, and the water ran clear. Tobin still had his name, but when the river was quiet he could hear it called from under the sluice, slow and kind, the way a mother calls a child in for supper. Nell told him to stop answering. He always answered.