Full back tattoo in traditional style showing a black snake coiled between red roses, sun faces, dripping apple and blue waves, with forearm and upper arm tattoos visible.

Traditional back piece with snake, roses and sun faces

Traditional · Back · Colour · Photo

A large traditional back piece centres on a black snake coiled up through two dark red roses, with flowers, leaves and sparkle-like stars filling the background. Two sun faces with yellow petal rays sit above, with a dripping red apple at the top and a blue wave pattern with an orange form at the base. Bold black outlines and solid fills are used throughout, with a full palette of reds, yellows, greens, blues and orange on a light skin tone.

Traditional Back Upper arm Forearm Snake Rose Sun Apple Flower Wave Star Heart Ship wheel Bee

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit nearer, where the lamp can reach you, and mind the bucket by your boot. That's the tin dish my grandfather hung under the Wheel shaft, and it has never once held anything but sea. Now then. You've heard about Tom Pengelly, who went down Botallack with a candle and a bottle of cold tea, and came up on the Sunday with his hair gone white and his pockets full of stones?

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What they never told you is the garden. Tom reached the bottom of the eleventh level, where no pick had ever rung, and there were roses growing out of the wet rock, red as a collier's lamp and just as stubborn. A black snake lay coiled among the stems like a rope somebody had forgotten to flake down. It lifted its head and spoke in the voice of the man who owned the shares. 'You've come for the tin,' it said. 'I have,' said Tom. 'Then you'll pay the old price.' It held out an apple, split and dripping the way the sea drips through the roof of the workings, and said one bite would light his ladder home.

Tom didn't bite. He's a Pengelly, and a Pengelly never took a gift without asking what it cost. So the snake showed him the sky it had hung up for him: two suns above the engine house, one with its face running wet, the other smiling with nothing behind its eyes. 'Choose which one lights your way,' it said, 'and I'll give you the ladder.' Tom chose neither. He turned his back on both and climbed by the light of the sea.

They found him at dawn on the cliff path, soaked to the knees, with his hands full of nothing at all. The wheel on the engine house was turning slowly in the wind, and the tide had already come in over the wave-cut rocks, blue and then orange where the sun broke through. He said the tin was still down there, and he'd leave it. So if you go down, mind the bucket. It's the only thing down there that's ever been honest with me.