Two tattoos on the lower legs, a grey and red snake on the left calf and a pink floral design on the right ankle, in a traditional and fine-line mix.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Snake and rose tattoos on lower legs

Traditional · Calf · Mixed · Photo

Two tattooed lower legs wear black studded shoes against a pale tiled floor. The left calf shows a grey snake coiled around a red-accented rose or heart shape, with bold black outlines and soft grey shading. The right leg has a grey bird or figure above the ankle and fine red and pink botanical linework on the ankle.

Traditional Calf Ankle Snake Rose Bird Flower Vine

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Mari, the studs came up from the forge at Hollin on Tuesday, four hundred of them, pyramid-headed and black from the quenching bath. Father would have made me count them twice, and I did, twice, with the lamp pulled close and my spectacles smeared with tallow.

Keep reading

The order was for Lady Sabeth Orrin of the Gilded Quarter, who wanted shoes that would make the marble of the Tessary floors ring like a bell. She wanted three buckled straps at the ankle and a snake. I told her a serpent on a shoe was bad luck in Carrow, where the eel-wives still spit when they pass a cobbler's door. She laughed and said luck was for people who did not own a sword.

So I drew it the way Father taught us to draw an eel in the margins of the ledger: the snake coiling round a single red rose, grey shaded like river mud, outlined heavy as a tax roll. Above the rose I set a swift in flight, and along the ankle I ran fine red vines with little hooked thorns, copied from Grandmother's pattern book. The madder dye took three tries before it sat right.

When she came for the fitting she turned the shoe over in her hands, studied the snake for a long while, and asked whether I could put the rose on the other shoe too, so the snake would never be alone. I said yes, though it cost me a day's wages in gold leaf. Come home before the thaw and see them walk. Your brother, Tobiah.