Colour traditional tattoo of an orange, green and yellow striped snake coiling around a cream skull on the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Striped snake coiled around a skull on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A striped snake with orange, green and yellow bands wraps in loops around a cream-coloured skull with dark shaded eye sockets. The snake's head, with a yellow eye and teal-edged jaw, sits at the right of the composition, and the design runs horizontally across the skin. Bold outlines, flat saturated colour and soft black shading on the skull give it a classic flash look.

Traditional Forearm Snake Skull

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The snake came up through the grates of Ferrier Street the week the lamplighter died, and nobody thought to ask where it had lived before. It was striped like a boiled sweet, orange and green and a yellow that caught the sodium lamps, and it went about the back alleys after midnight looking for a skull that would suit it. Most people who saw it went indoors and bolted the door.

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The sexton at St Brannoc's kept one in his cellar, cream-coloured, with black hollows where the eyes had been. He had kept it on a shelf since his wife was buried, and he did not much mind who came for it. The snake found it through the coal chute. It wound three times round the bone, tight enough to hum, and asked in a voice like a kettle coming to the boil whether the sexton meant to keep the thing or let it go.

The sexton said he would give it to the first honest man who asked. So the snake went out into the city to find one. A tram conductor offered a fistful of pennies. A barmaid offered a kiss on the cheek. A man in a good coat offered to put it in a museum, and the snake would not have that at all. Only a boy with a bicycle asked for nothing, so the snake gave him the skull and went home.

At first light the sexton came up the cellar steps and found the shelf bare and a striped tail hanging through the grate. He sat on the bottom stair and waited for the kettle to start, but nothing came. The lamps went out one by one along Ferrier Street, and somewhere a bicycle bell rang twice, very clearly, the way a boy does when he has something he means to keep.