Black and grey snake tattoos on a woman's ribs and hip, with a coiled snake wrapping around the side of her hip and thigh.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Snake tattoos on ribs and hip

Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A woman wearing a white mesh crop top and white shorts is photographed from the side, with her torso and hip in frame and her head cropped out. A shaded black and grey snake runs down the side of her ribs, and a larger coiled snake wraps over her hip and onto the upper thigh. The image is a close, well lit crop with soft blurred background.

Ribs Thigh Snake

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, the lot of you, and mind the cracked tiles, because this tale is older than the sea wall and it has a serpent in it, and serpents never care whether you are comfortable. In the years after the tide took Vell Harbour, there was a salvage woman called Ora Penhallow who kept a grey snake in the old pump house. Nobody knew where it came from. It slept coiled on the warm iron of the dead reactor casing and kept the grain sacks free of rats, and in return Ora left the hatch open so it could come and go as it liked.

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One wet spring the water rose through the lower galleries faster than anyone had reckoned, and the last pump key was still down there, hanging on its hook beside the sluice wheel. Ora took her lamp and went down after it. The snake went first. It slid through the black water with its head held high and its body rippling out behind it in long grey loops, and Ora followed the shape of it in the lamplight the way you follow a lantern up a stair. When the water reached her chin, the serpent wound itself round the sluice wheel and leaned its full weight against the valve, and the gate that should have burst instead groaned shut.

She came up with the key in her fist and the snake came up after her, slower, its scales dripping. The pumps caught on the third try. Ever since, the children of Vell have been taught to leave the grain hatch open at dusk, and to never, ever trouble a grey snake that climbs out of the water and looks at you as if it is counting the sacks.