Black and grey realism portrait of a woman with white eyes and snakes in her hair, set within an ornate filigree frame on the thigh.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Woman with snakes in ornate frame on thigh

Realism · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A realistic portrait of a woman with white, blank eyes, dark lips and a small stud in her nose, with snakes curling through her hair and over her shoulder. The portrait is framed by a dense black filigree border with scrolls and a shell motif at the base. The image is shaded in black and grey, with soft tonal gradients in the face and hair and bold, crisp linework in the frame.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The Halloran Brothers' Travelling Show had lost its elephant in the spring, its strongman to drink in June, and by October the only attraction left worth a shilling was Mrs Vesna Caul, who sat in a frame of tarnished gilt at the back of the tent and let the snakes do the talking. Nobody had seen her eyes open in twelve years. Some said they had gone white from staring at the sun over the mountains where she was born, and some said plenty else.

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Her snakes were called Tuesday, Ruth and the old one, whose name nobody would say aloud. Each night a boy named Dilly Frost drew the velvet back, and each night the forty or so farmers and their wives went quiet, because the snakes lifted their heads towards the lamp as if reading the room. Dilly was paid in coppers and sugared plums. He asked her once what she saw. She said, "Only what is coming up the road, love, and it is never what they paid to see."

In September a man in a grey coat arrived with a letter from the council, wanting the field for houses. The show had three weeks. Dilly found the old snake coiled in the brass dish that held the takings, and Mrs Caul sitting very still in her frame, her blank eyes turned towards the flap of the tent.

On the last night the tent was empty but for the two of them. She lifted the old snake onto her shoulder and told Dilly to fold the velvet, take the road east, and not look back until the lamps ran out. "Tell them the eyes went out," she said. "They will believe that. They always believe the blind ones." He went. The field was houses by spring, and the shell-backed mirror turned up on a stall in Lincoln, still warm from somebody's hands.

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