Three pencil sketches of snakes coiled inside shield-shaped crests, drawn as possible tattoo designs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Three snake crest sketches in pencil

Black and grey · Flash

Three shield-shaped crests are drawn in pencil on a white background, each with a snake coiled within it. The snakes differ slightly in pose and head angle, and the shields have scrolled tops and decorative edges. The linework is soft and sketched, with grey shading that suggests form and texture, and the image is entirely greyscale.

Snake Serpent Shield Crest Sketch

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

When the shield-maker of Cold Wenning died, he left his three sons a workshop, a jar of soft grey chalk, and three oak shields still unpainted. Each was to draw a snake on his own shield and hang it over the door. Whoever's snake looked the most alive would keep the workshop. The eldest asked how a snake could look alive on wood. The middle son asked what a snake was for. The youngest asked nothing and took the chalk.

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The eldest drew his snake in a tight S, its tail wrapped around the rim so it could never slip. He worked by lamplight and told anyone who passed that it was the most careful snake in the valley. The middle son drew his coiled twice through the centre of the shield, head lifted, and shaded the scales so they seemed to ripple whenever the door swung open. Neither brother looked at the other's work.

The youngest drew nothing for nine days. On the tenth morning he came down to find that the eldest's snake had cracked the oak along its spine, and the middle son's had slid to the floor and curled around the leg of the bench. He sat with the chalk for a long while. Then he drew a snake with its head turned back toward its own tail, the way a sleeping dog turns toward the warmth of another.

When the brothers came back that evening, the three shields hung together over the door, and the snakes seemed to lean toward one another. Nobody won the workshop. They left it to the mice, and the mice, the valley says, have kept it tidy ever since.