Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Snake coiled around a staff

Fine line · Black and grey · Flash

A black pencil sketch shows a snake wrapped around a straight staff, with its head near the top and its tongue extended. The scales are rendered with fine hatching and small dots, and the body is shaded to suggest curves and volume. The design is drawn on plain white paper, with a mechanical pencil resting diagonally in the lower right corner.

Fine line Dotwork Snake Staff Serpent Scale

Find an artist for this

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

Tuesday, 14th March. Sixty-one days out of Gravesend and the Marigold still cannot decide whether she is a ship or a wardrobe that floats. I have had the carpenter nail a board above the medicine chest, and on it I have pinned the pencil drawing I made last night of the staff and the serpent, copied from the brass badge on Captain Lusk's old sea chest. Cook says it looks like a stick somebody has been unkind to. Mr Abel says the snake looks as though it is trying to climb out of the wood, which is what every patient wants to do.

Keep reading

The boy in the forward berth, Joseph Penhale, is fourteen and has had the flux for nine days. I have given him calomel and laudanum in the measures my old teacher swore by, and I have sat with him through the hours when the swell drags the lamp across the beams. Last night he asked me why the emblem of my trade was a snake and not a dog or a lamb. I told him the old story: the god of healing wound a serpent about his staff, because serpents cast their skins and come back new. He thought about it for a long time, then said he would rather be a lamb, since lambs never have to shed anything.

This morning the sea eased and the lamp hung still. Joseph took a little broth and asked for the drawing, so I fetched it down. He traced the snake's tongue with one finger, careful not to smudge the graphite, and fell asleep with the sheet on his chest.

I have sharpened the pencil twice since then. Not because it needs it, but because my hands want something to do while I wait for the fever to break. Tomorrow I shall write to my sister in Bristol and tell her the Marigold is a ship after all.