Pencil drawing of a striped serpent with an open-jawed reptilian head biting its own tail to form a circle, shown as a tattoo design with no body placement.

Striped serpent eating its own tail

Black and grey · Flash

A striped serpent with a reptilian head and open jaws bites its own tail, forming a closed circle. The dark bands are shaded with fine pencil hatching while the lighter bands are left mostly bare, and the head has sharp teeth, a spiked crest and a small eye. The drawing is in graphite on a plain pale background, centred with open space in the middle.

Serpent Snake Stripe Teeth

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The stationmaster at Thornwick Halt always said the serpent came up through the drain grate in October, when the wet got into the cutting and the signal lamps guttered. He had seen it once, he claimed, a long length of banded grey that ran round the foot of the water tower and bit its own tail to close the circle. The stripes were the colour of old platform paint, dark where the shade fell and pale where it didn't.

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Signalwoman Ada Pryce did not believe him until the night the eleven-fifteen failed to reach her box. She took her lamp down the line and found the serpent coiled across the points, its crested head raised. It asked her a question in a voice like a shunting engine far off: where does the tail end? Ada walked along the banded body, counting sleepers under her boots, and saw that it went on without a break, round and round, back to the head.

'Nowhere,' she said. 'It begins where it ends, same as my shift.' The serpent hissed, and the lamp flared blue. It opened its jaws wide enough to swallow the signal box whole, then slowly loosened its grip on its own tail. The circle broke into a long gap of rail and gravel, and the eleven-fifteen came roaring out of the dark, its lamps throwing bright stripes across the cutting.

In the morning the stationmaster found Ada asleep in her chair with the lamp still warm. He wrote the train down as on time, and beneath the timetable someone had scratched a ring into the wood with a nail, a ring with nothing inside it.