Colour tattoo of a Star of Life with a serpent entwined around a staff, outlined in black with a quote curved around it, on a leg.

Star of Life with serpent and lettering

Other · Mixed · Photo

A bold Star of Life emblem with a serpent wrapped around a staff sits at the centre of the design, with thick black outlines and flame-like shading. The shading uses pink, blue, purple and white highlights within each arm of the star. A curved line of script runs around the top and right of the motif, and a further line of text sits below it, set against pale skin.

Other Serpent Staff Lettering Quote Emblem

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nell had the night shift at Coldharbour General the winter the river came over the bridge, and by two in the morning the corridor outside Bay Four smelt of wet coats and bleach. The old porter, Walter Pike, leaned on his trolley and said nothing, which was how she knew the bad one was coming.

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The bad one was a farmhand called Danny Rook, carried in by his brother with one hand swollen like a loaf. An adder had got him in the hayfield, he said, a grey one that came out of the wet grass as if it had been waiting. Nell had seen plenty of bites in her years. None of them had gone the way this one was going, and the colour was climbing his arm faster than she liked.

She had her grandmother's brass staff in her coat pocket, the one with a serpent wound round it. The fen women used to say the snake sheds its skin to keep on living, and the one who keeps watch must do the same. So Nell sat by the bed and measured his breath against the clock, gave the antivenom in small careful doses, and talked him through every village on the drove road so he would stay awake. He called her a liar twice and asked for his boots once.

At seven the grey light came in over the car park. Walter found the staff leaning against the sluice door with its serpent wound tight, and beside it lay a thin curl of skin, pale as paper, that nobody could say had come from a snake or from Nell.