Black and grey realism tattoo of an open toothed jaw with a snake wrapping through it on a man's neck, with a coloured eye in a triangle on the chest below.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Toothed creature jaw and snake on neck

Realism · Neck · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo covers the neck and shows a large open jaw lined with rows of sharp teeth, with a snake or tendril-like body curling through the mouth. The linework is fine and the shading is detailed and tonal, with a dark, textured background across the throat. Below, on the upper chest, a small eye within a triangle with blue-toned iris sits between radiating black lines, adding the only significant colour to the image.

Realism Neck Chest Teeth Snake Creature Eye Triangle Ray

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bosun had nailed the forward hatch shut twice before Tom Hawley swore he'd heard the grating shift from underneath, a dry sound like someone counting teeth. Eleven weeks out of Bristol for Valparaiso, the *Lydia Marr* had sailed through calms and two gales without a man lost, and the crew had grown easy with the ship's small noises. This one was different. Cook Nan Pook came up from the galley with a lamp and her sleeves still wet from the scrubbing, and she said the bilge smelled of cold iron and wet hair.

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By the second watch they had the hatch off. Lying in the bilge water was a coil of something pale and ridged, thick as a hawser, with a head at one end that had no jaw to speak of, only a hinge of bone that opened wider than any man's mouth. Rows of teeth ran along the inside like the teeth of a saw, and the coil moved through them slowly, as if it were chewing on its own tail. Captain Osgood Bream stood over it in his shirtsleeves and read aloud from the ship's articles, because he had no other notion what to do. The thing lifted its head at the sound of his voice and turned towards the sextant box, where the brass lid was stamped with an eye inside a triangle.

They fed it the logbook, page by page, and it took each one without complaint. On the morning of the twelfth day the hatch stood open to a flat grey sea, and the bilge was dry. Nan Pook found the captain's brass sextant on the galley table, its lid bitten through at the eye, and a line of neat marks running round the rim where something had tested the metal and found it wanting. When the lookout called land ahead, nobody could say which way the ship had been steering all night.