Colour neo-traditional style tattoo of a stylised green and teal creature with script lettering and red zigzag details on an upper arm and shoulder.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Stylised creature with script on upper arm

Neo-trad · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A stylised green and teal creature with a horned or crested head wraps across the upper arm and shoulder, with a red arrow above it. Bold black outlines define the shapes, and the body is filled with green and teal shading, with green and red zigzag and hatch-like patterns. Black script lettering sits across the creature's body, and red and blue wavy lines fill the lower part of the design.

Neo-trad Upper arm Shoulder Creature Arrow Script lettering Zigzag Serpent

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The sea serpent came back to the Skerry the week my brother took the last boat across to the mainland, and nobody on the island believed me except the goats. I had been mending nets on the slipway when the water went flat as a plate for a full minute, then rose in a green ridge the length of a fishing smack, its crested head turning towards me like a question.

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Grandmother had a name for it, painted in careful red capitals on the bow of our old crabber: MIRREN. She said it was not a monster but a keeper, that the channel between Skerry and Holm had been its charge since before the lighthouse, and that it only showed itself when someone was about to cross who should not. I thought that was the sort of thing old women said to keep children off the rocks. I went down to the boat anyway, with the flare my father kept for emergencies tucked in my belt.

The serpent did not attack. It lay alongside the hull and let its zigzag scales catch the light, and a line of small red waves ran off its back the way the tide runs over sand. Then it sank a little, and I saw my brother's dinghy, overturned and drifting towards the reef, with a gap in the water where he should have been. I fired the flare. The serpent dipped its head and slid under the hull, lifting us both, and carried us to the shingle as gently as a mother with a cup of tea.

My brother came ashore at dusk, shivering and cursing, saying the current had simply taken him and let him go. I didn't argue. Mirren keeps the channel, and some debts are paid in a silence that outlasts grandmothers. Next morning I painted her name back onto the bow in red, beneath the old one, and the sea was calm enough to show my reflection, and something green turning slowly beneath it.