Black and white flash design of a snake coiled around a crescent moon, eye, heart, skull and crossbones, dagger, pentagram and flower on a black background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Snake with crescent moon and skull

Black and grey · Flash

A white linework illustration of a snake coiled vertically down the image, with a crescent moon at the top and a closed eye, heart, skull and crossbones, dagger, pentagram and flower placed along its body. The scales are rendered with fine stippled and hatched detail, with the snake's head and tail tapering to thin lines. The design sits on a plain black background and is presented in a single tonal palette.

Snake Crescent moon Eye Heart Skull Crossbones Dagger Pentagram Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Brother Theon, the cart reached the Canopic gate two days after the flood waters went down, and the old snake-seller was already setting out his jars. You asked in your last letter whether the rumours about him are true. They are true in the way the Nile is wet: nobody argues about it, and nobody drinks from it without boiling first.

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He keeps a basket of asps under a grey cloth and a bowl of dried flowers beside it. Each night he lifts the cloth under the moon, holds up a little silver dagger and asks the crowd which of them owes him a debt. Nobody answers. Last week a potter's boy did, and the next morning the boy's mother came to my table with a wax heart and asked me to read what it meant. I told her it meant she should pay the man his coin and be done with it.

Yesterday I went to see him myself, carrying the star tables you lent me. He laughed at the tables, then took my hand, turned it over and pressed a cold coin into my palm. He said the moon in his picture was not waxing or waning but only waiting, and that the snake eats its own tail to pass the time. I did not understand him, so I wrote his words down and am sending them with this letter.

Here is the strange part. When I counted the coin this morning, it bore no king's face, only a skull with a flower growing from its jaw and a tiny star scratched beside it. I have set it under the lamp and it does not tarnish. Do not tell Mother. Come at the next flood and bring your own cup, and we will see whether the snake has anything left to say to us.