Red pencil drawing of a woman with snakes in her hair and a rose, in a neo-traditional tattoo design style, with no body placement shown.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Woman with snakes and rose in red pencil

Neo-trad · Colour · Flash

A red pencil drawing of a woman's head and upper body, with snakes winding through her hair and around her shoulders and a large rose with leaves at the top left. The linework is fine and sketched, with soft red shading on the face and hair, and a row of dotted beads running down the neck and body. The composition is a single figure on a plain off-white background, with a snake body extending into a loose, splashed red base at the bottom.

Neo-trad Woman Snake Rose Flower Leaves Bead Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The roses came up from the terraces below the quarry every spring, and my mother sold them by the bundle at the harbour steps, where fishermen bought them for their wives and the wives threw them back. Nobody wanted the red ones that year. The rains had been heavy, and the petals bruised brown at the edges before anyone could carry them up to the agora.

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The woman came down the steps on the third morning of the festival, when the sun was still low and the gulls were quarrelling over the fish guts. Her hair was piled high the way the women of the city wore it, and through the coils moved small grey snakes from the cliff crevices, the ones we were all taught to leave alone. She did not hide them. She stopped at our stall and touched a bloom with one finger, and the snakes lifted their heads toward the petals as if someone had asked them a question.

She bought nothing. She asked my mother what the rose was for, and my mother, who had never been spoken to by a stranger without a price attached, said it was for remembering. The woman laughed and said that was the one thing the sea never gave back. Then she gathered a fistful of the bruised roses, wound them into the snakes' coils, and walked back up the steps. By noon every bloom in our basket had darkened to the colour of wine, and the dew on their stems had dried into little pearls that would not wash away.

My mother still will not sell the red roses. She keeps them in the cool cellar, and every spring when the rains come I go down to check on them. The dried pearls on their stems are always warm, as if something beneath the petals is still breathing.