Black and grey snake tattoo with scaled detail coiled around an upper arm, its head near the shoulder.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Snake coiled around upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A large snake is tattooed around the upper arm, with its head raised near the shoulder and its body wrapping in several bands around the arm. The scales are rendered with shaded edges and highlights, giving the body a rounded, three-dimensional look. The ink is black and grey, and the warm lighting in the photo gives the skin an orange cast.

Realism Upper arm Snake Scale Coil

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit nearer the stove and mind the cat, for the coal's near gone and I'll not tell this twice. The Hester Wren was working the Trent that winter with a hold of salt for Gainsborough and a deckhand called Abel Quarrie, who feared nothing on land and everything on water, in that order.

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On the third night out of Keadby, Abel went below with a lantern to fetch a spare warp and found a snake asleep in the coil. It was longer than his arm, banded black and ash like old pewter, and when it lifted its head the lantern seemed to dim. Abel did not shout. He sat on a salt sack, rested the lantern on his knee, and told it all about his mother, who had also been unreasonable before breakfast.

The snake listened, which is more than the master ever did. By Torksey it had tired of the cold and begun to climb, up the mooring post and along the tiller, until it found Abel's upper arm and wound itself three times round, the head rising over his shoulder to watch the water go by. The master swore it would have to go. Abel swore back, and the snake, I'm told, hissed in agreement.

They tried to put him ashore at Gainsborough, but the snake would not leave him and Abel would not leave the snake. He bought a coat with sleeves wide enough to hide the thing and took a berth on the next barge down, and not once in forty years did it bite him. When the ice went out each spring he'd roll the sleeve up on the bank and let the river look at it, and the river, as far as anyone could tell, always looked back.