Traditional style flash drawing of a snake coiled around a dagger, in black linework on textured tan paper.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Snake wrapped around a dagger

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

A dagger points downward through the centre of the image, with its hilt at the top, and a snake coils around the blade several times. The design is drawn in solid black outlines with segmented hatching along the snake's body and the grip. It is shown in black ink on a rough, deckled tan sheet with no shading or colour.

Traditional Snake Dagger

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The snake had been living in the bilge for a week before anyone admitted it. My father found its skin first, folded over the tiller bar like a pale glove. He said it was a sign the boat wanted a new name. Mum said it was a sign he should stop buying cheese by weight from the chandlery at Hythe.

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We were moored below Oxford at Bossom's Wharf, where the Thames runs slow and brown past the willows and the lock-keeper keeps a jar of barley sugar on his sill. I went looking for the snake with my grandfather's dagger, the one with the brass pommel shaped like a ball, which he used for cutting bread and rope. The blade had gone dull and the grip was split. I found the snake instead, wound three times round the steel where I'd left it on the cabin step, its head resting by the crossguard as if it were reading the label on the loaf.

I didn't reach for it. My grandfather always said grass snakes don't bite what they don't mean to eat, and that a blade is only a thing until someone decides what it's for. So I sat on the step and waited. The river slid past, a moorhen argued with a coot over a crust, and the sun crept up the mooring rope. After a while the snake loosened its coils, slid off the steel into the cow parsley, and left the dagger bright with a ring of dew where it had been.

That evening I scrubbed the blade with vinegar and sand until the pommel shone like a lamp. Dad asked why I'd bothered. I told him it was for the next time the boat needed a name. He laughed, then looked a long while at the bilge hatch, and didn't argue.