Black ink drawing of two snakes with scale texture, interlocking in a circle on a plain tan background, shown as a tattoo design.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two snakes intertwined in a circle

Black and grey · Flash

A drawing of two snakes with their heads at the top and bottom, their bodies coiled and interlocked to form a ring. Dense black shading and fine scale texture fill the bodies, with bold outlines separating the coils. The design is shown in black and cream on a plain tan background, centred with generous margins.

Snake Serpent Circle Scale

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dana had been standing by the buffet for ten minutes before she admitted she was waiting for Owen Mallory to come through the double doors. The function room at the Crown in Hebden Bridge smelled of sausage rolls and floor polish, and somebody had hung a banner reading Class of '98 with one of the Ks peeling away. She kept her name badge turned face down on her lapel, the way she always had at school when she didn't want to be picked.

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They had kept the grass snakes together in the biology annexe, two of them in a glass tank under the window, fed on pinkie mice that Owen bought from a pet shop in Halifax with his paper round money. The snakes were called Hengist and Horsa because Mr Pilling thought it was funny, and by the fourth year nobody could separate them. Every lunchtime the two of them sat on the windowsill with the tank between them, arguing about which snake had bitten whom, and somewhere in that argument they had stopped speaking to anyone else.

Owen came in at half eight with grey at his temples and a lanyard he had clearly been handed at the door. He saw her and stopped. Neither of them said anything for a while. Then he took a biro from his jacket, drew a small ring on the back of a paper napkin with two heads meeting at the top and bottom, and pushed it across the table towards her.

She understood without asking that he had carried the idea for twenty-six years, the way you carry a stone in your pocket. "They never did get out of that tank," she said. He folded the napkin into quarters and slid it into his wallet. Outside, the Calder ran loud under the bridge, and she realised she had not turned her badge over once all evening.