The Gadsden flag inspired the snake depicted on the cover of Metallica’s album commonly called The Black Album.
The cover shows a coiled snake in the lower-right area, paired with the band’s angled logo in the upper-left. The snake is derived from the Gadsden flag, an eighteenth-century American flag associated with the motto “Don’t Tread on Me.”
That motto also appears as the title of a song on the album, creating a deliberate visual and thematic connection between the packaging and the track list. On the original cover, the logo and snake were embossed so subtly that they were difficult to see against the black background.
The design is sometimes confused with other snake imagery or with the cover of Spinal Tap’s fictional album Smell the Glove, a resemblance Metallica jokingly acknowledged. The real historical source identified for the snake is the Gadsden flag.