Black and grey realism tattoo of a winged caduceus with two snakes wrapped around a staff, placed on the back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Winged caduceus with snakes on the back

Realism · Back · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a winged staff with two snakes coiled around it, topped by a small orb, with a rod or blade running down the centre. The wings and scales are rendered with detailed greyscale shading and highlights that give a three-dimensional, metallic look. It is centred on pale skin, with the design filling most of the frame.

Realism Back Wing Snake Staff Sword Orb

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bosun had the forehatch open again by six bells, and the stink of the bilge came down the companionway into my sick bay like an accusation. I was stitching a cut on the cook's thumb when Renn came in with the lantern swinging and asked whether the old surgeon's staff was still in the locker. I told him it was. I had kept it because nobody else aboard the Corinna Vane wanted to touch it: a brass rod no longer than my forearm, a blade riveted down its length, two serpents worked round it in fine hammered scale, and above them a little bronze ball the men called the eye.

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Dr Ashby, who had sailed her twice before he died of a bad heart off the Cape, used to say the thing was a physician's emblem and not a weapon, and that the blade was for opening what the snakes were meant to cure. I never understood him. Renn did, or near enough. He took the staff from its green baize and held it to the lantern, turning the winged crown so the light ran along the feathers like water.

The fever had come aboard at Port Louis, and by the hundredth day eleven men had it. We had no quinine left, only the bark tea I boiled for the watch. Renn was the first to say what we all knew. 'Lance the boils,' he said, 'and let the luck decide the rest.' I pried the blade from its sheath and found a folded paper glued inside the hollow spine, in Ashby's cramped hand: a druggist's name in Batavia, and beneath it, 'Wings are the way out.'

We raised Batavia nine days later with the fever broken and the paper in my coat. I still have the staff. The orb rolls across the chart table when the sea is rough, and each time it stops I count the men who lived.