Black and grey dotwork tattoo of a crocodile-headed figure in a long dress beside a skull-headed figure in a checked outfit, on the inner forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Crocodile and skull figures on a forearm

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A cartoon-style illustration shows a figure in a long dress with a crocodile head, standing beside a figure with an animal skull for a head and a checked, nutcracker-like body. The bold outlines are filled with fine dotwork shading in black ink on a forearm. The design is shown in black and grey with plenty of open skin around it, and a coin sits at the top right for scale.

Dotwork Forearm Skull Figure Dress Animal skull Cartoon

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Ottilie Crane had sewn the green silk dress herself, because no tailor in Hallow Mere would take measurements from a crocodile. She pinned the hem by the window of the lodge at the forest's edge while the cold came in past the hornbeams, carrying the smell of wet bark and woodsmoke up from the village. Her nephew Tobiah had been promising the nutcracker would be ready for the midsummer dance for three weeks.

Keep reading

The nutcracker arrived on the Tuesday, rattling in a barrow. Tobiah had found the stag's skull bleached under a fallen oak and spent his nights carving a wooden body with checked panels of painted pine. Its jaw clacked when you lifted it, and its eyes were two brass buttons polished until they caught the lamp. Mrs Crane looked at it for a long time and then said, "He will need a better bow tie."

At the dance the fiddler started a slow reel, and the two of them turned in the square under paper lanterns, her skirt swinging out like a bell. The villagers stepped back to watch. For one whole tune the nutcracker held her gloved hand without a single clack of its jaw, and Mrs Crane forgot to mind the way her long snout made the children giggle.

When the music stopped, the skull tipped towards her and said nothing, which was the most honest thing anybody in Hallow Mere had offered her all year. She took up the lamp, walked home through the trees, and left the door open behind her in case he wanted to follow.