Traditional colour tattoo on a thigh showing a red snake, a blade, a lightning bolt, a red rose and a banner reading They Make A Master Of Death.

Snake, rose and banner on a thigh

Traditional · Thigh · Colour · Photo

A traditional style tattoo on the outer thigh shows a red and yellow snake coiled above a blade, with a dotted orb behind a lightning bolt and a banner reading 'They make a master of death'. A large red rose with green leaves sits at the base of the design. Bold black outlines frame the solid red, green and yellow fills, while the orb uses stippled dotwork shading.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dolly Ashcombe had kept the snake box oiled since the night the Great Wheel came down at Margate. Her uncle Albert swore a serpent fed on Sundays would never strike on a Monday, so she gave Juno her mouse each Sunday and latched the lid the rest of the week. The show was still Mr Fenwick's Marvels, though Mr Fenwick had been dead four winters and the caravan now belonged to his nephew Ray, who wanted it sold before the frost.

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Ray came round the back of the big top as the lamps were going out, a bottle of gin in one hand and a solicitor's envelope in the other. "They're taking the knife board," he said. "And the glass."

Dolly didn't look up from the leather strap she was stitching. The glass was the crystal ball Fenwick had bought off a dealer in Ipswich, and it had a crack down one side shaped like a bolt, ever since the storm that had brought the wheel down. Fenwick used to say the crack was the only honest thing about the act. Ray's gin smelled of juniper and his hands would not keep still.

Hours later, with Ray's taillights gone down the lane, Dolly lifted the glass from its velvet and set it on the trestle beside the board. The first lightning of the season flickered over the marshes and lit the crack from inside. Fenwick's patter came back to her in his cracked, cheerful voice: they make a master of death, love, and they'll pay you in pennies for a look at it. She rubbed the glass on her sleeve, peered into the bolt, and saw nothing she hadn't put there herself, which Fenwick would have called the whole trade.

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