Black traditional-style tattoo of a snake coiled around a skull with a dagger below, with dotwork shading, on a calf.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Snake coiled around a skull on a calf

Traditional · Calf · Black and grey · Photo

A snake coils around a skull with a dagger-like blade hanging below the jaw, all in bold black outlines. The skull's shading and parts of the snake's body are built from fine dots, while the eye sockets and teeth are solid black. The design is centred on pale skin with leg hair visible at the edges, and the ink is black with no colour.

Traditional Dotwork Calf Snake Skull Dagger

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the lamp is nearly out and the last ferry won't run till the tide turns. You want to know why Dennis Harrow never crossed the Vell bridge again? Mind the bottom step, it's slick with frost.

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Orla Pike ran the customs hut at the Vell crossing for thirty winters, with a tin roof, a stove that smoked, and a ledger for every sack of salt that went over. Every Thursday a man came through with a wicker basket on his hip and a dagger-handled letter opener tucked in his belt. He said the basket held a pet, a grey snake that liked the cold. Nobody lifts the lid on a snake, so Orla never did, not for a whole year.

Then the frost came early and the snake stopped moving. Orla lifted the lid with the end of her pen. Inside was no live thing curled on straw but a skull wrapped in a silk stocking, its jaw pinned shut with a sliver of blade, and the grey snake lay coiled round the bone like a guard dog that had fallen asleep on the job. She understood then that the snake had been the watchman, and the watchman had been keeping the skull warm for somebody else.

Orla didn't call the constables. She wrote one line in the ledger, one skull and one snake, and then she carried the basket down to the river and let the current have it. Dennis never came back on a Thursday. So when you cross the Vell, count your own sacks, and never trust a man who keeps his dead closer than his papers.