A snake is illustrated on the cover of Metallica’s album commonly called The Black Album.
The cover uses an extremely dark design featuring the band’s logo and a coiled snake that can be difficult to see at first glance. The restrained artwork helped create the visual identity behind the album’s enduring nickname, even though the official title is simply Metallica.
The snake is associated with the phrase “Don’t Tread on Me,” which is also the title of one of the album’s songs. That connection has led some listeners to focus on the song when discussing the artwork, but the animal shown on the cover remains a snake.
The cover is sometimes described only as black because the image is deliberately subtle. It is not a large, brightly colored illustration, and the low-contrast design can make the reptile easy to miss in small reproductions. Anniversary packaging preserves the album’s iconic dark visual concept while adding new archival content.