Black linework tattoo of a wavy snake made of radiating tick marks, with a faceted geometric head, running down the inside of a forearm against a dark background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Wavy snake of radiating ticks on a forearm

Blackwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A black ink tattoo of a serpentine form runs diagonally across the forearm, built from short radiating tick marks that thicken and thin along its curves. The head at the lower left is drawn as an open faceted outline with fine internal hatching. The image is taken close up on a dark background, which makes the clean black lines stand out against the skin.

Blackwork Geometric Forearm Snake Serpent Line

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The tide-reckoner of Scarrow Haven had cut her marks into the seawall for forty years, one short stroke for every wave that touched the third stone, and she had never once miscounted. So when the snake came up the slipway in the grey before dawn, she did not look up from her chalk. She only said, "You're late, and you've brought the wrong tally."

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It was as long as a rope of wet kelp, and it moved the way the sea moves under a boat, in long swells that thickened where they bent. Along its back ran rows of short dark strokes, all pointing outward like the spines of a sea urchin, and the fishermen who came down to watch swore each stroke was a wave it had already swallowed. Its head was cut in faceted planes, like the split rock at the harbour mouth, and it rested on the stones as if waiting to be paid.

"Count me, then," the snake said.

She counted. Forty years of strokes, a thousand thousand tides, and every one of them was in the snake's back. The harbour had been keeping its accounts in that creature all along, and the sea had only been lending it out. She rubbed the chalk from her fingers and read the number aloud, and the snake sighed, coiled once around the lighthouse post, and slid out on the ebb without taking a single fish.