Traditional tattoo on an upper arm showing a woman's head wrapped by a three-eyed serpent, with a red and orange rose and green leaves below.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Woman, serpent and rose on upper arm

Traditional · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A woman's head is partly covered by a serpent with an open mouth, orange jaw edges, and a third eye on its head. A red and orange rose with green leaves sits below, linked by a thin stem. Bold black outlines, solid fills and a bright palette of red, orange, green and grey give it a classic flash look, shown in a full view and a close-up panel.

Traditional Upper arm Woman Serpent Snake Eye Rose Leaves

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

No, sit nearer, the fire only warms the front of a person. Yes, the serpent in the wood. Every child in Ashcombe knows the bones of it, but the tellers always skip the rose, and the rose is where the truth sits. Mary Oake carried one that morning, cut from her mother's wall and wrapped in wet cloth, with orders never to let it touch the ground.

Keep reading

The serpent lived in the hollow under the old yew, and it had three eyes. Two blinked the way ours do. The third sat in the middle of its brow and never closed, and whoever met it saw their wrongs laid out like a ledger read aloud. Her brother had taken the miller's silver and let the blame fall on the carter's boy. Mary had kept his secret a fortnight, and it sat in her chest like a stone in a boot. So she climbed the stile, and the serpent lifted its head, jaws opening, edges glowing orange like a lamp through paper.

It asked what she carried. She said nothing, and the third eye narrowed while the ledger turned its pages. Then she unwrapped the rose. The serpent studied it a long while. A rose kept hidden in a cloth, it said, goes to rot before it ever opens, and yours has been wrapped since dawn. Mary saw then that the wrapping had been the rot. She laid the bloom on the grass, and it opened fully for the first time.

She walked down to the mill with empty hands. Her brother was at the wheel, and when she told him plainly, the silver came out of the flour sack before the sun dropped behind the church. The rose still grows on that mill wall, if you care to look. Children who pick it are never sent to bed without being asked what they are hiding, and they always tell the truth.