Black traditional-style tattoo of a winged caduceus with two snakes, with the words IMPLANTED above and DEFIBRILLATOR below, on a patch of skin.

Winged caduceus with implanted defibrillator lettering

Traditional · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A winged caduceus, a staff with two entwined snakes and a pair of wings, is the central subject. The word IMPLANTED arcs above it and DEFIBRILLATOR arcs below in bold black capitals. The linework is solid and dark with simple grey shading on the wings and snakes, and the design fills the frame against a plain skin background.

Traditional Other Wing Snake Staff Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The herring fleet had been out three nights when the Good Intent came in low in the water with a boy aboard who had been dead for the length of a Hail Mary. Old Tobias Merrin met her at the slip with his bag and the carved staff he kept under the thwart. He had cut it from ash the winter his wife went quiet, two snakes wound up its length and a pair of wings set at the top like a gull lifting off the water.

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He did not pray over the boy. He had watched the Newlyn men do that, and it had never once started a heart. Instead he laid the staff across the boy's chest and told Ellen Pascoe to fetch the copper coil from the lamp room. The coil had come off a wrecked steamer years back, and the widow Pascoe had hidden it under her floorboards because nobody on the quay could agree whose it was. Tobias wound the wire round the ash, and the snakes took the current as if they had been waiting for it all their lives.

The boy's chest jumped. Once. Then the staff shook in Tobias's hands and he held on, because letting go was how the sea took people. The boy coughed salt onto the planks and opened his eyes at the wings.

The next spring every mast in the harbour had a pair of wings painted near the crosstree, and nobody asked where the coil had gone. Ellen Pascoe kept her floorboards down. The ash staff hangs in the net loft now, its wings gone grey as driftwood, and when the tide turns on still nights the boys swear the snakes shift a little on their wire.