Black tribal-style scorpion design on a white background, with a curved tail and pincers, shown as a standalone drawing rather than on skin.

Tribal scorpion design

Black and grey · Flash

A bold black scorpion design on a plain white background, with the body, segmented legs, tail and pincers all built from solid black shapes outlined by white channels. The linework is thick and symmetrical, with the tail curling up and over the body and a separate pincer shown at the top left. There is no shading, and the composition is centred on the body with the tail sweeping to the right.

Scorpion Tail Leg

Find an artist for this

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

The crate of Madeira had been nailed shut in Lisbon, and nobody aboard the Serafina Rose opened it until the Doldrums, when the water turned to green soup and the cook took a crowbar to anything that might be food. Packed in straw beneath the bottles lay a scorpion the length of my palm, black as pitch and so glossy that the lantern light ran along its back in thin white channels. The cook dropped the lid and swore. Captain Ruddock came down the ladder with his pistol still in his belt and ordered it over the side before the next bell.

Keep reading

Mercy Pell, our bosun, had other ideas. She was a widow from Penzance who had buried two husbands and did not frighten easily. She scooped the creature into an old biscuit tin, punched air holes in the lid with a marlinspike, and fed it the moths that gathered round the binnacle lamp. She said it had come aboard to keep the rats honest. Nobody believed her, but the rats did begin to avoid the forward hold.

The gale came on the twenty-third night out, the kind that lays a ship on her beam and sends the hatch covers flying like playing cards. In the worst of it the tin was knocked from the chart table and split open. When I found it wedged against the bulkhead, the scorpion was climbing the ratlines by the lookout post, its tail lifted high and curled over its back. At first light the lookout bawled that breakers lay dead ahead, and the scorpion had turned its tail to the bow, pointing like a finger at the reef.

Ruddock hauled us round to starboard and we cleared the rocks by a cable's length. He never again mentioned the sea. The tin rides on the chart table now, lid wired shut, and when the captain studies the coast of Cornwall he taps the glass once, very gently, the way you might greet a shipmate.