Black and grey realism tattoo of a stepped pyramid, a feathered serpent and a skull on the forearm, running down towards the wrist.

Stepped pyramid, serpent and skull on forearm

Realism · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A stepped pyramid rises across the top of the forearm, with a feathered serpent coiling down over it and a skull wearing an ornate headdress below. The shading uses smooth grey gradients and sharp highlights to give the carved stone and scaled serpent body a three-dimensional look. The design fills the forearm from the elbow side towards the wrist against a softly blurred background.

Realism Forearm Pyramid Serpent Skull Headdress

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ximena counted the steps a third time, her torch held low so the beam skimmed the stone the way her grandmother had taught her to read a wall. Ninety-one. The survey drawings pinned in the site hut said ninety-two, and the gap sat in her chest like a swallowed stone. Someone had cut a step out, or the rains had taken it, or the stair had never been finished at all.

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Halfway up, the air changed. It turned cool and damp and smelled of wet lime and old copper. Ahead, cut into the riser, a feathered serpent lifted out of the stone, its scales sharp as the edges of playing cards, its jaw hung open above a skull crowned with a headdress of carved beads. Someone had polished the eyes until they caught her light. She had seen the same figure in the museum photographs, but photographs did not breathe.

"You are late," the serpent said, not unkindly, in the flat voice of a clerk checking a ledger. "The count was ninety-two when the last mason went down."

She asked what it wanted. It asked her to carry up the missing step. She told it stone did not fit in a torch bag, and the serpent laughed, a dry sound like sand in a sieve, and said the step was not stone. It was a promise, and promises were heavier. She thought of her grandmother's kitchen, the chalk marks on the door frame, the years her family had kept counting things that were no longer there. She sat down on the cold stair, laid her palm flat on the riser, and felt the stone warm beneath her hand. Below, in the dark where the car park lights ended, something began to climb, and she heard it counting under its breath.