Snake and Dagger Tattoo Ideas and Meaning

What a snake dagger tattoo means

A snake alone can mean renewal or danger, and a dagger alone readiness or betrayal. Wound together they settle on one reading, a warning. The snake is alive and the blade is bare, and neither has struck. Most people who wear the pair mean that they will defend themselves and would rather not have to, the bargain a rattlesnake offers with its tail.

Benjamin Franklin made that point about the rattlesnake in 1775, writing as An American Guesser in the Pennsylvania Journal that she never begins an attack and, once engaged, never surrenders. Two snakes on this page are drawn in their warning displays: the cobra with its hood spread wide above the tip, skin stretched over lengthened neck ribs, and the rattlesnake with its rattle raised over the pommel. The banded king snake is the dry joke of the set, a species that eats rattlesnakes and resists their venom.

Whether the snake coils round the blade or is run through by it changes the sentence. Coiled, the two are allies and the threat is held in reserve. Run through, as on the blade flash sheet here beside a dagger through a rose, the snake is beaten. A rose adds the oldest literary gloss: Lady Macbeth tells her husband to look like the innocent flower but be the serpent under it, and in the next act he sees a dagger before him. The neo-traditional design, its dagger point through a red rose, puts all three in one piece.

The blade shifts the accent. A tantō with a cord-wrapped hilt, like the one under the green and gold snake here, carries the Japanese sense of the snake as a guardian; a slim stiletto is quieter and more sinister; the plain flash dagger pointing straight down, held low and ready, is the classic that most of this page follows.

Where the design comes from

The pairing belongs to American flash, the sheets of stock designs painted by hand that shops hung on their walls and copied for customers. The curator of the San Francisco tattooist Lyle Tuttle's collection counts Death Before Dishonor among the four or five most famous tattoos of the Second World War, and one of its usual forms was a dagger with a snake round it. Sailor Jerry Collins, tattooing sailors in Honolulu until his death in 1973, kept snakes wound round daggers on his flash. What changed afterwards was the company the design keeps: the witchy flash sheet on this page sets the same snake-wrapped blade beside a candle, a crystal ball, mushrooms and a moth.

Choosing yours

• Count the coils before settling on a size. Two turns round the blade, as on the traditional design pointing down, keep the snake legible at 10 cm; the king snake and the rattler take extra turns and need half as much length again, because scales packed between the turns close up first as the ink spreads.
• Put the head where you want eyes to land. Rising past the guard with the jaws open, it reads as the warning; curving down toward the tip, as the rattlesnake does, it pulls the eye along the blade to the point.
• Match the snake to the style. Flat red, green and yellow suit a generic flash snake, while a named species such as a cobra or a king snake needs its real markings, which suits black and grey.

Common questions