Black and grey blackwork and dotwork tattoo of a snake coiled around a peony-like flower with smoke above, on a forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Snake coiled around a flower on a forearm

Blackwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A snake winds diagonally down the forearm, its scaled body outlined in bold black lines and partly shaded with fine dots. It wraps around a large pale flower with shaded petals and a few pointed leaves, and a loose wisp of smoke rises from the top near the snake's head. The design is entirely black and grey, with soft dotted shading against the white highlights of the flower and the untattooed skin.

Blackwork Dotwork Traditional Forearm Snake Flower Peony Smoke Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Okonedo kept her peonies in a tin bath on the fourth-floor walkway, and nobody on Calder House was allowed to forget it. The bath had been a cattle trough once, or so she said, and she had dragged it up eleven flights with her late husband's sack truck. That spring the big pink heads came out the size of dinner plates, and by June the whole walkway smelt of them.

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The snake came in July. Nobody saw it arrive. Mr Pryce from flat nineteen swore it had come up the drainpipe, and Kerry from the lift said it had come out of the bin chute, which was the sort of thing Kerry said. What we knew for certain was that it lay on the warm concrete outside Mrs Okonedo's door like a dropped rope, and that when she came out with her watering can it lifted its head and looked at her as though she owed it rent.

Nobody would touch it. Someone rang the council, someone rang the RSPCA, and someone's nephew said a man on the internet could handle it for a hundred quid. Meanwhile somebody lit a cigarette on the stairwell landing and the smoke drifted up past the window, and the snake turned its head towards the smell, unbothered.

In the end it was Mrs Okonedo who sorted it. She put a saucer of milk by the bath, sat on her step with a flask, and talked to it in Igbo for an hour while we watched from the railings. When she came back in she said it had gone round the back of the bins to find its own flower. We never saw it again. The peonies dropped their petals in August, and she left the bath where it was, just in case.