Full back tattoo of a snake coiled around a skull with waves and clouds, in grey shading with small orange accents, placed across the back.

Snake and skull full back piece

Japanese · Back · Mixed · Photo

A large back piece shows a snake wrapped around a skull, with a fanged head rising at the top, and carved-looking waves and clouds filling the background. Script in a Sanskrit-style lettering wraps along the snake's body, and a word in block lettering sits low on the lower back. The shading is mostly grey and black with fine stippling, while small orange-red tones on the skull and eye area add colour.

Japanese Realism Back Snake Skull Wave Cloud Script Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You have been told the snake in Hollin Seam is older than the chapel roof, and you have decided not to believe it, which is why you are crawling the low drift at four in the morning with a lamp that gutters each time the air shifts. Water runs down the rock in ribbons. Someone has chalked numbers on the timber props, and beneath the numbers are letters nobody in Hollin can read, copied out by a priest's widow from a book she would never show anyone. Your father called the thing the Churchwarden. It took one man in ten, he said, and gave back only a skull and a smell of apples gone to rot.

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The smell reaches you before the light does. Where the seam pinches to a crawl, a bone sits on a ledge of coal, pale and patient, and a thread of gas burns faintly in its brow, orange as a coal left in the grate. You reach for it because your hand is steadier than your sense. Behind you the rock makes the sound a wet rope makes when it is hauled through a pulley. Coil after coil slides over the props, each one carrying the same carved curl of cloud and wave you have seen worked into the chapel ironwork.

You cannot outrun anything in a crouch, so you do what your father did, which was to count. You say the names on the pithead board, one for each breath, starting with Joseph Ash, who went down the year you were born and never came up. The fanged head comes over your shoulder, close enough that you feel its breath on your neck like a draught from an opened door. You do not look at it. You keep counting.

At the eleventh name the rope-sound slackens. At the nineteenth it is gone, and the drift is only water and your own pulse. You crawl out at first light with grit in your teeth and the lamp still lit, and at the pithead the clerk writes down a name that is not yours, then looks at you twice, as if he is counting too.