Black and grey snake coiled around a skull on a forearm, with a fine line triangle and circle tattoo on the wrist of the other arm.

Snake and skull on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A forearm shows a black and grey snake coiled around a horned skull, with its head resting near the wrist. The linework is fine and the shading uses dark tones and light hatching to give the scales and skull some depth. A small fine line triangle inside a circle sits on the other arm near the wrist, and the hands rest together against a striped and newspaper-patterned background.

Fine line Geometric Forearm Snake Skull Triangle Circle Script Hand

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The snake came up the stairwell of Calder House the week the lifts stopped, and nobody on the eleventh floor thought to ask where it had been. It was as thick as a drainpipe and grey-black in the dark, with a skull lodged in the coil of its body, horns curling back from the bone like the handles of an old pram. Mrs Ada Pell found it asleep on the landing mat and did not scream. She had buried two husbands and a budgie, and she knew a creature that only wanted a warm place when she saw one.

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The snake would take nothing but milk and the company of anyone who chalked a triangle inside a circle on their door. Nobody knew who had started that. The lads from the bin store said it meant the flat was paid up, and the couple on nine swore it kept the damp out. Ada drew the mark on her own door with a stub of blue chalk, and each night the snake slid in under it and curled by her radiator, its head resting near the cold pipe like a hand near a wrist.

In February the council sent men to seal the shaft. They came with torches and a hessian sack, and found the snake coiled at the lift doors with its jaw open, guarding nothing they could see. One of them laughed. The next morning the lifts ran, the sack lay empty by the bins, and a fishbone key sat on the ground floor where the rubbish chute spat out. Ada kept it in her handbag for the rest of her days, and every spring, when the shaft began to hum, she left the lid off the milk.