Japanese style flash drawing of a black and grey snake coiled around two blue peonies, with a small skull in grass at lower left.

Snake and peony flash design

Japanese · Mixed · Flash

A full colour flash design showing a large snake with a red, yellow and grey scaled body, coiled around two blue peony flowers with green leaves. The snake's head sits at the lower centre, and a small skull lies in a tuft of green grass at the lower left, with a separate black snake line above it. Bold black outlines, grey shading and white highlights frame the scales, peonies and wave-like swirls.

Japanese Traditional Snake Peony Flower Skull Grass Wave Scale Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The serpent had been coiled around the peony bush since the spring the fishermen stopped coming up the north shore, and nobody on Ardnish could say who had planted the bush or who had first seen the snake drinking from the rainwater barrel behind the chapel. Old Morag Keir swore it was the same creature her grandmother had fed with milk saucers, grown longer and greyer with every winter, its scales the colour of wet slate and its eyes ringed in green like the sea under cloud.

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When the flowers opened that June, the blue of them was so deep the children would not walk past without stopping. Dougal Brae, who had come back from the mainland with a bad hip and a worse temper, said it was nonsense, that snakes did not care for flowers, and then he took his knife and cut a single bloom to bring home to his wife. He reached the cliff path before the wind came round. The serpent was there on the stone wall, head raised, tongue flickering the salt air, and it did not strike. It only turned its gaze toward the grass below the wall, where a small white skull lay among the tufts as if it had been waiting there for a long time.

Dougal dropped the peony. Next morning, the bush had two flowers where there had been one, and the snake had moved its coil to shelter them both. Morag says the island takes what it is owed and gives back in its own time, and that the skull is only a reminder of what the old fishermen left behind. Dougal says nothing at all about it now, but he walks the cliff path every evening, and he never passes the wall without leaving a saucer of milk in the grass.