Black and grey tattoo of a skeletal raptor-like dinosaur in shaded dotwork on the inner forearm.

Dinosaur skeleton on a forearm

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A skeletal dinosaur, resembling a small theropod, runs across the forearm with its jaws open and clawed feet raised. The bones are rendered in fine black linework with stippled shading that gives them dimension and texture. The image is in black and grey against a dark background, with the tail trailing toward the elbow.

Dotwork Realism Forearm Dinosaur Skeleton Claw Bone Tail Skull

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ada had been working the same knuckle of grey shale since breakfast, her dental pick ticking against it like a clock that had lost its nerve. Outside the Oakhollow quarry office the rain was thinking about starting, and the foreman's wireless kept losing the cricket somewhere over the hill.

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By noon the thing in the rock had a shape. Long hind legs folded beneath it, a neck bent like a hairpin, a skull no bigger than a walnut with its jaws hung open as if it had been mid-shout when the mud came down. Every rib was a sliver of knitting needle. Mr Pryce leaned in with his pipe unlit and said it was a runner, and the men from the county college would want it lying flat on its belly in a glass case, labelled and tidy.

Ada didn't argue. She turned the slab a few degrees and worked the matrix from the tail forward, each vertebra coming free like a bead slipping off a string, until the whole animal was caught in its stride with one foot lifted clear of the stone. Pryce watched her do it and said nothing, which in Oakhollow counted as agreement.

When the plaster set, she carried the cast down the hill in the back of the van and propped it on the windowsill of her mother's kitchen, facing the road out of town. The rain came on at last. The little creature stayed exactly where she had put it, one clawed foot raised, looking as though it had somewhere to be.