Black and grey dotwork drawing of two snakes forming an infinity symbol inside a circle, shown as a tattoo design on white.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two snakes forming an infinity symbol in a circle

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

Two snakes with detailed scale patterns form a figure of eight inside a circle, with their heads meeting at the top and bottom of the ring. The bodies are shaded with fine stippled dots and outlined in bold black linework, giving the snakes a rounded, three-dimensional look. The image is entirely black ink on a plain white background, with the design centred and filling most of the frame.

Dotwork Snake Infinity symbol Circle Scale

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The culvert under the Hollow Mile was the only place on the road where the sand stayed cool past noon, and I had stopped there because the survey wheel had jammed for the third time that morning. Two snakes lay in the mouth of the pipe, one bending left and one bending right, their bodies crossing in a loop that looked less like an animal than a sum someone had chalked into the dust. Their heads met at the top and bottom of the round throat of the pipe, as if they had agreed to keep the circle shut.

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I had been surveying the Hollow Mile for six weeks for the county, and every chainage I logged came out a metre short of where the last crew had put it. Old Pell at the depot laughed when I told him. He said the road did that, that it folded back on itself in the heat and you only had to drive it long enough to find the joint. I didn't believe him until I laid my tape across the culvert and read the same peg number at both ends.

The snakes did not move while I measured. I found myself talking to them the way you talk to a dog that is waiting for something, and I told them about my daughter in Port Verity who had asked me to come home for her birthday, and about the forms I still had to sign. When I looked up, the tape had gone slack and both heads had lifted from the sand, angled toward the road I had come in on.

I drove back the way I had arrived. Eleven miles later I passed the culvert again, and the snakes were there, nose to tail, and this time I did not stop.