Traditional style tattoo of a green and black snake with red markings coiled around red roses and green leaves on a forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Snake coiled around roses on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A green and black snake with red markings coils up the arm, with its head raised at the top. Red roses and green leaves are tucked between its loops. Bold black outlines and flat, solid fills give it a classic traditional look, with colour inks dominating the design.

Traditional Forearm Snake Serpent Rose Leaves Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The keep above Harrowgate had lost its roof before anyone living could remember, and in the winter of the great frost the north wall came down into the ditch in one piece. Ada Penrose was the only one who went up the goat track at noon, carrying her father's dinner in a cloth. He was the mason, and he would not come down until the wall was standing again.

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Below the chapel was an old well, and in it lived a snake as green as pond weed and banded with rust. It lifted its head out of the nettles to watch her. Her father said such creatures brought ruin. Ada said it was only hungry, so she left it the crusts from her bread and, one morning, a red rose picked from the bramble over the chapel door.

Her father laughed when she told him. He stopped laughing when the rain came and every stone he set slid back into the ditch by morning. One evening he took his bucket of lime down to the well and came back up without it, and he did not say what had passed between him and the snake. The next morning the north wall stood straight, its mortar still damp and dotted with petals.

In spring the roses climbed through every seam of the ruin, and the snake slept in the warm rubble with its tail wound round a stem, as if someone had given it a garden to keep. Ada still carried the dinner up the track, and her father still ate it on the wall, looking down at the well.