Black and grey photograph of a large snake tattoo coiling around a torso, circling the navel and running down the side onto the ribs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Snake wrapping around a torso

Blackwork · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A large snake is tattooed across the torso, its head rising near the upper abdomen and its body coiling around the navel and down the side. The scales are outlined in detailed linework with dense black shading along the body. The photograph is black and white, so the image is entirely black and grey, with the tattoo filling most of the frame against bare skin and dark clothing.

Blackwork Ribs Snake Scale Torso

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit yourself down on that bench, the 9.14 is late and it always will be, so we have the length of a kettle. You want to know about the snake of Coldharbour Junction. Everybody has a version. Mine is the one my mother told me, and she had it from a porter who swore on the lamp oil.

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Back in the wet winter they were laying the new cutting through the chalk, and the men dug up a thing nobody had a name for. Black as coal dust, with scales like hammered brass on a cap badge, coiled round itself three times over. They tried to cart it off in a wheelbarrow. It would not be carted. Every time they turned their backs, it had wound itself a little tighter round the signal post, the way a hand closes over a coin.

So the stationmaster sent for Ada Crane from the refreshment room, because she had buried two husbands and was not afraid of anything with a tail. She walked out along the platform with a tin of bread crusts and a pot of tea, sat on the cold rail and talked to it through the night about the price of coal and her sister's goats. By the time the milk train came through, the snake had loosened and slid off into the tunnel mouth, and the signal post stood straight again, with a ring of bright scales left on the rail like sequins dropped from a dress.

Ada never said what she had promised it. The porter said she came back grey and laughing and bought the whole platform a bun. Some mornings, when the points are frozen and the engines wheeze, you can still see a dark loop moving under the gravel, going somewhere it has not finished going.