Black and grey realism tattoo of a snake coiled around an ornate dagger hilt with smoke, across the side of the ribs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Snake coiled around a dagger on the ribs

Realism · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A realistic snake with detailed scale texture coils around an ornate dagger hilt with scrolled metalwork, its head resting at the lower left. Soft smoke or cloud shading fills the background and lower area, with fine blended greys giving depth. The tattoo is in black and grey ink and fills the frame along the side of the torso.

Realism Ribs Snake Dagger Smoke Scrollwork

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Right, sit down, the lot of you, and mind the glass on the floor, that's Mr Pryce's from number nine. You want the story of the knife or the story of the snake? Same story, it turns out, though it took me forty years to see it. Calder House had nine storeys then, before they wrapped it in that blue plastic and called it heritage.

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The knife belonged to a man called Tomas Wray, who fixed lifts for the council and kept his tools in a leather roll. He had a dagger with a hilt cast like iron scrollwork, curling up like smoke off a dying match, and he never let anyone touch it. One winter the lift shaft flooded and a snake came up out of the drains, a grey thing as long as a bus, or so the story went when the men came back from the pub. Tomas went down after it with that knife in his hand.

Nobody saw what happened in the shaft. What they saw was the smoke, rolling up the stairwell from the boiler room, grey as the snake's back, and Tomas climbing the stairs to the fourteenth landing with the blade held point down and something coiled round his wrist. It was rope, I've always assumed, though Tomas never said. He just laid the dagger on the windowsill, and the grey light came through the hilt like lace.

So when they ask me if it's true, I tell them the snake was never the danger. It was the thing that kept the knife still while the man decided what to do with it. Now who's getting the biscuits?