Black and white tribal design of a snake with its mouth open, showing fangs and a forked tongue, set against swirling blackwork flame shapes; drawn design with no body placement shown.

Tribal snake design

Blackwork · Black and grey · Flash

A bold black and white drawing of a viper with its mouth wide open, showing fangs and a forked tongue, and its scales picked out in white linework. Sweeping solid black tribal shapes curl behind the snake's body and head, with white cut-out highlights along their edges. The design is high contrast and fills a tall, narrow composition on a plain white background.

Blackwork Snake Fangs Tongue Scale Tribal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The hatch on Deck Nine had been sealed for two hundred years, and the thing behind it had kept its promise better than the shipwrights who built it. Ines heard the hiss before she saw the coils, a sound like wet sand sliding down glass. I pulled my boot back just as the head came out of the dark, jaws wide, black ribbons of plating flaring up behind it like a storm front over the Ridge.

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The Hollow Market paid in water for coolant cartridges, and the old reactor lines were full of them. The crew of the *Halden Vow* had bred that serpent to scrub the cooling channels, feeding it on rust and silence, and nobody had told it the ship was dead. I had heard the stories in the drinking halls at Tessaly, how the maintenance beasts still rode the pipes and bit anyone who came calling without a drone pass. I had not believed them until the fangs stopped a hand's width from my visor.

But it did not strike. Its tongue flicked over the cartridge in my grip, tasting it, then over Ines's bare wrist, and then it drew back and curled itself around a locker where a dead engineer had died holding a child's toy. Ines wanted to shoot. I told her no. We had been sent to strip a ship, not to unmake whatever still kept watch over it. So I set the cartridge down on the grating, one slow inch at a time, and the serpent watched me do it with eyes that were older than the Ridge.

We walked out with two cartridges and our lives, which was more than the last crew had managed. Behind us the hatch sighed shut on its one remaining hinge, and somewhere in the dark a tongue tasted the air, counting the ones who had left.