Black ink snake coiling around a forearm, its body filled with lace-like ornamental patterns in a blackwork style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Snake with lace pattern on a forearm

Blackwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A black ink snake coils around the forearm, its body filled with intricate lace-like openwork patterns. The outlines are bold and the fills are solid black with some grey tones. The arm rests against a floral patterned fabric, with clasped hands at the top of the frame and a dark background behind.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bindweed has come over the back wall again, and you are on your knees in the kitchen garden with a trowel you have forgotten to put down, watching the grass snake lift its head out of the rhubarb. It does not hurry. It never does. Your grandmother used to say the snake was the garden's own lacemaker, that it wove the pattern of the seasons into its skin so the frost could never find the seams.

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You have her bobbins still, in a biscuit tin in the shed, the wooden ones worn pale where her thumbs pressed. Last winter you tried to make an edging from her pricking and it came out in knots, lopsided, and you put it in the tin with the bobbins and did not look at it again. Now the snake turns in the sun and its back is open-worked like the collar she made for the vicar's wife, every hole a small clean window, and you realise the thing you could not do with thread it has been doing all along with muscle and scale.

You go to the shed for the tin. The lid sticks. Inside, under the pricking, is the collar's last bobbin, and you wind a length of linen around your fingers the way she showed you, slowly, the way the snake moves through the beans. Outside, the tip of the tail flicks once against the rhubarb leaves and is gone under the fence.

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