Traditional style tattoo of a teal and black snake coiled around a red rose on a lower leg.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Snake coiled around a rose on a calf

Traditional · Calf · Colour · Photo

A snake with a teal head, yellow eye and open red mouth coils down around a red rose with white highlights. Bold black outlines define the forms, and the snake's body is banded in teal, yellow and brown. Teal and black leaves and small radiating lines fill the space around the rose, against plain skin.

Traditional Calf Snake Rose Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The wasps had found the windfalls before Dorrie did, so she was already cross when she came down the Bramley rows with the basket. Her brother Hal sat on the gate post with his boots off, pretending not to watch the rose that climbed the wall behind the old cider press. It had stayed red all August, though nobody had pruned it since their father died.

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"It's back," Hal said, pointing with his chin. Coiled through the lower canes was a grass snake as thick as a man's wrist, its head raised, tongue flicking as if it were tasting the air for weather. Dorrie had seen it the last two summers. Every late August it came to the rose, and every year the rose seemed to open a little wider to meet it.

She set the basket down. "Dad said it meant the orchard would keep." "Dad said a lot of things when he'd had the cider." They watched the snake ease its body out of the thorns, slow as a clock hand. Behind it, the skin had come away whole and pale, lying across the leaves like a dropped stocking, its bands of yellow and teal still showing.

Dorrie lifted the skin free with two fingers, careful of the thorns, and folded it into her apron. It weighed nothing. She would take it to Mrs Cole at the bakery in town, who pinned odd things above her counter, and say it had come from the orchard, which was true enough. Hal asked whether she meant to keep it. She said she'd keep the rose, and left the snake to slide back into the nettles, unhurried, as if the whole year were its to spend.