Black and grey dinosaur skull tattoo on a heavily tattooed forearm, with roses, a skull and mandala patterns nearby.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dinosaur skull and roses on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey tattoo of a dinosaur skull, which appears to be a T. rex, sits on the forearm among other tattoos of roses, a human skull and mandala patterns. The skull uses dark outlines with shaded areas, and the teeth are sharply defined. The arm rests against dark fabric, and the photograph shows the sleeve from the elbow towards the wrist.

Traditional Dotwork Forearm Rose Skull Mandala Sleeve

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lion died in March, and by April Asquith had sold the big top poles to a scrapyard in Hull and kept only the trailer that held the dinosaur. Nobody paid to see the dinosaur any more. It was a cast of a tyrant lizard's skull bolted to a plywood plinth, and I was the one who cleaned its teeth every Friday with a toothbrush, because the hand-painted sign still said real bone.

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Mrs Pell from the Co-op came on the Tuesday with her grandson, who pressed his nose to the glass and asked whether it could still bite. I told him it could, if you were daft enough to put your hand in. He laughed as if I'd given him the best news of the year. Asquith would have called that a sale. The boy went home with a sticker shaped like a footprint, and I wrote his name in the ledger under takings, which was the only honest column we had left.

Vinnie had come with the wagons in 1979 and never paid for a single meal. He sat on the tailgate one wet afternoon with a box of needles and a bottle of black ink, and said the trick was to work in the dark and never trust a line you drew in daylight. He gave me roses first, then the skull, then the mandalas that the other lads joked were for my nerves. When I asked why the thing in the trailer had to be on my arm, he only tapped the glass with one knuckle. "Keep the thing that bites," he said. "The rest is just the show."

Asquith took the trailer in June and left me the key on a loop of baling twine. I still have it. Some evenings I sit with the window open and the streetlight comes through the blinds, falling across the jaw on my arm, and the teeth look sharper now than they ever did under the big top lights.