Solid black dinosaur skeleton tattoo running along the inside of a forearm, shown in two stacked photos.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dinosaur skeleton tattoo on a forearm

Blackwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A dinosaur skeleton, with a long curved spine and tail, a skull at the wrist end and bony legs, is tattooed along the forearm. The skeleton is filled with solid black ink with fine white-free detail picked out in the bones, and the design sits on pale skin against a black and white patterned shirt. The top photo shows the full length of the arm and the lower photo shows a closer view of the same tattoo.

Blackwork Forearm Dinosaur Skeleton Tail Spine Skull

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

Dear Aunt Hester,

Keep reading

Forgive the sand in this envelope. I am writing at the scrubbed kitchen table of Mrs Gillow's boarding house, with the back door open so the tide can hear me. The bones came up the cliff path at six this morning on a handcart, wrapped in an old sail, and Mr Tulley swore on his mother's grave that they were the whole of a beast from the Blue Lias. Forty feet of spine, he said, though I counted thirty-one vertebrae before he lost his temper and told me to mind my hands.

The skull was the trouble. It had been crushed flat at the far end where the slip caught it, and nobody wanted to be the one to lift it. Mrs Gillow sent me for the flour sieve, and between us we brushed the grit from the small bones with a goose feather while Tulley told us how the thing had walked on two legs like a heron that had lost its temper. Its legs were long and hooked, and its tail tapered away to nothing, like a bad sentence.

By noon the whole length lay along the floor of the back parlour, held down by pebbles from the beach. I sat with my sketchbook and drew it from above, which is how I came to notice the odd thing. When I laid a length of string along the curve of the spine to measure it, the string fell exactly along the inside of my own forearm, bone for bone, as if the creature had been waiting there to be copied.

I have offered Tulley a shilling a bone to keep the lot whole until you visit. Do not laugh. I have decided I will have the thing copied in ink, not stone, so that it can walk with me up the lane to chapel on Sunday. Mrs Gillow says the lodger who drowned here in 1891 will want his room back. I have told her I am not afraid of bones, only of how neatly they fit.

Your loving niece, Ada