Black tattoo of a snake coiled around a straight staff, centred on the upper back.

Snake coiled around a staff on upper back

Back · Black and grey · Photo

A single snake winds around a vertical staff, with its head resting near the top and the staff ending in a curved base at the bottom. The snake has solid black outlines and filled areas, while the staff is shaded in grey tones to give it depth. The design is centred on pale skin with fine body hair visible around the edges of the frame.

Back Snake Staff Serpent

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Now sit down, the lot of you, and mind the coal dust on that bench, because this is the true one about Amos Rudd and the snake that came up Hollin Pit in a sack of oats. Nobody in Carrick Bank believed it then and half of them won't believe it now, but my nan saw the staff with her own eyes, the ash wood gone pale where his hand went round it every morning.

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Amos was the pit's horse-doctor, a quiet man who could ease a colic in the dark and set a broken leg on the cage floor. The snake was a grass snake, no longer than his forearm, and it had lived in the feed store all winter, fat on mice. When the seam flooded in February and the men were stuck below, Amos went down the shaft with his staff over his shoulder, and the snake wound itself up the wood the way it always did, head held high, tongue tasting the air.

Down in the dark gallery the water was rising to the knees of a boy called Tommy Ogle. Amos lifted the staff and the snake turned its head toward the drip of the roof, toward the gap where the air moved. Tommy said afterwards that he followed that head like a lamp, and with every step it took the water seemed to drop a finger's width.

They say the staff still stands in the chapel porch, the snake carved so its scales catch the light. Don't you touch it. Amos said a thing that goes up and down a shaft has to be left where it can find its way home, and that is why it hangs on the wall now, facing the pit wheel.