A rattlesnake appears on the cover of Metallica’s album commonly called The Black Album.
The artwork shows a dark, nearly black background with the Metallica logo and a coiled snake positioned near the lower-right area. The snake is associated with the song “Don’t Tread on Me,” whose title and imagery draw on the Gadsden flag and its warning symbolism.
Because the cover is intentionally subdued, the snake can be difficult to see in small reproductions. That visual restraint is also why the album’s informal title became The Black Album: both the logo and snake are embossed or printed so subtly that the cover appears almost entirely black.
The animal is sometimes loosely described as a generic snake or incorrectly identified as a cobra. The more specific identification connected with the artwork and song is a rattlesnake, making it a sharper trivia answer than simply “snake.”