Black ink fine line illustrations of dinosaur skeletons, a trilobite and a turtle fossil on a person's thigh and knee, with a vintage camera held in the frame.

Dinosaur and trilobite fossil designs on thigh

Fine line · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A person in white rolled-up shorts holds a vintage rangefinder camera while showing a set of black fossil-style designs on the upper thigh and knee. The designs include a stegosaurus skeleton, two smaller dinosaur skeletons, a T-rex skeleton, a trilobite and a turtle skeleton, drawn in fine black linework with light hatching. The skin is light and the background is softly blurred greenery, so the designs stand out clearly.

Fine line Thigh Dinosaur Skeleton Turtle Camera

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The stegosaurus came out of the Purbeck clay in eleven pieces, and Maud swore at each one as though it had personally insulted her. I held the brushes and the cups of water and kept my mouth shut, because she had been at the museum since before my mother was born and I had been there four months.

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Mornings she let me photograph the bones before we lifted them. She had an old rangefinder with a stiff shutter, and she said a camera that made you wait was a camera that made you look. I learned to count the spacing of the plates along the tail and to hold my breath on the focus ring. Trilobites turned up in the same spoil heap, curled like commas, and she would tip one onto my palm and say, this one rolled up when it was frightened, and nothing came to fetch it for four hundred million years.

On the last Friday of the dig she handed me the film canister without a word. I developed the roll in the darkroom under the stairs, and the frames came up grey and then clear: the bones resting on their felt, Maud's thumb at the edge of one shot, and in the final picture a small pale shape in the clay that I had not noticed at all. It was a turtle, or the skeleton of one, lying with its legs folded as if it had gone to sleep in the wet. Underneath, in her cramped capitals, she had written: KEEP THIS ONE. YOU WILL WANT TO BE THE ONE WHO LOOKED.