Large colour tattoo on a back of a spiral serpent over a fine dotted geometric pattern, with red script strands hanging below.

Spiral serpent and script on a back

Geometric · Back · Mixed · Photo

A coloured serpent coils into a spiral around a central wheel motif, with blue, yellow, red and white bands. It sits on a background of fine dotted geometric lines, and red script characters hang down in curling vertical strands beneath it. The composition fills the upper and middle back, with the design centred on the spine.

Geometric Dotwork Back Snake Spiral Wheel Geometric pattern Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Old Hanne's well at Carrow Keep had a serpent in it, the miller's boy said, and it had been coiled there since the castle fell. Everyone in the valley knew the tale, but nobody went near the well after dark. Hanne went anyway, because her goat had gone over the broken wall and the goat was the last thing she owned.

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She found the serpent curled round a stone wheel at the bottom of the cistern, its bands red and blue and yellow, like the wool her mother used to dye. Its tail was sunk in the black water and its head lifted towards her. It did not strike. It asked her, in a voice like wet stone, what she had brought to pay for the goat's return. She had nothing but the words her grandmother had taught her, the ones for turning away fire and hunger. She said them aloud, one at a time, and each word dropped from her mouth like a bead and slid down into the dark in a thin red thread.

The serpent counted them. Seven words, then nine, then more than she knew she remembered. With each one the coils loosened, until the wheel turned on its axle with a sound like a mill starting up. Small points of light crept out across the cistern walls, a net of stars where there had been only stone, and the serpent lay still as a coil of rope.

The goat was waiting at the gate in the morning, fat and unbothered. Hanne never went back to the well. But when the grey rain came down on Carrow, the red threads of her grandmother's words still hung from the wall stones where they had fallen, and the valley children swore they heard them ringing whenever the wheel turned under the ground.