Pen drawing of a tattoo design sheet with a green-inked snake entwined in ivy, a shaded grey snake and a small botanical sprig, shown on textured paper.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Snake, ivy and leaf sprig design sheet

Botanical · Mixed · Flash

The sheet shows three separate designs on cream textured paper: a vertical snake coiled through trailing ivy in green line work, a larger grey snake with stippled and hatched shading, and a small sprig of leaves at the base. The green linework is fine and detailed, while the grey snake uses dense hatching to suggest form and scales. The colour is limited to dark green ink and grey tones, arranged with generous space around each element.

Botanical Realism Snake Vine Leaves Botanical

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Tomasz,

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The ivy has got to the eleventh floor now. Dad would have been insulted that the council never cut it back, and then secretly pleased. You know how he planted it under the bin store the summer you left, a cutting from a garden in Walthamstow he never got to see grow up a building. I thought it would die in the car park concrete. It went up the drainpipe instead, then along the walkway rail, then into the gap by my kitchen window.

Yesterday I found a grass snake sunning itself on the warm sill, as long as my forearm and perfectly still, its head turned towards the lift shaft as if it were waiting for the lift. I didn't scream. Mrs Okafor from fourteen came round with a broom and a bucket and said it was the first snake she'd seen since she came over from Lagos, and that in her grandmother's village it meant luck or trouble depending on which way it faced. It faced the ivy. We argued about that for a while.

We put it in a crate and carried it down eleven flights, because the lift smelled of something dead. In the car park we tipped it into the leaves under Dad's cutting, and it slid off without a backward glance, straight into the green like a thread pulled through cloth.

I've left the window open a crack since. Not for the snake. I just like hearing the ivy knock against the glass in the wind, like someone who wants to come in and isn't sure of the welcome.

Come at Easter. Bring the good kettle.

Love, Ruth