Colour and black-and-grey neo-traditional tattoo on the outer thigh, showing a snake coiled around a circle of poppies, black-eyed susans, a carnation and mushrooms.

Snake and wildflowers in a circle on a thigh

Neo-trad · Thigh · Mixed · Photo

A snake coils around a circular frame that encloses poppies, black-eyed susans, mushrooms and green foliage, with a red carnation and buds spilling outside the ring. The background inside the circle is shaded in black and grey, while the flowers are filled with bright yellow, orange and red. Bold outlines and smooth shading give the piece a clear, contained composition across the thigh.

Neo-trad Botanical Thigh Snake Poppy Carnation Mushroom Flower Leaves Wreath Circle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The grass snake came up the lane the week the poppies opened, and Maud Pennock, who had buried two husbands and a brindled goat, put down her hoe and let it be.

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Folk in Hollin Cross said a snake that chooses a garden is making a bargain, and nobody agreed on the terms. Maud did not ask. She ringed her plot with river stones, sowed poppies the orange of a good fire, black-eyed susans along the gate, and a red carnation her mother had carried over the water in a tin. Each morning the snake drew itself round the stones and watched the mushrooms come up in the damp under the hedge, pale caps no bigger than thimbles, standing like a choir that had not been told the hymn.

By midsummer the reeve arrived with a spade and a face like a closed door. The herring had turned away from the bay, he said, the nets had come up empty three days running, and it was the snake's doing, so the snake was going in the ditch. Maud pointed at the gate. He tried to step over the stones and found the ground gone soft and yellow with flowers that had not been there at breakfast, running in a line past the ring and out across the lane to the very gate of his own house.

He stood there a long time. Then he went home without the spade, and the next morning the nets came up silver, heavy enough to tear, and nobody in Hollin Cross asked Maud what she had agreed to.