Black and grey tattoo of a dinosaur skull with long teeth on the inner forearm, against a plain grey wall.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dinosaur skull on a forearm

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A dinosaur skull in profile, with a long snout, open jaws and rows of sharp teeth, sits along the forearm. The skull is rendered in black linework with shaded hatching across the bone surfaces and dark recesses. The plain grey wall behind the arm keeps the focus on the tattoo.

Forearm Dinosaur Skull Teeth Bone

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The skull came out of the cliff in March, after three days of gales had peeled back the clay below the old Carrow light. Mrs Ada Pell, who had kept the lamp for thirty-one years before her knees gave out, sent her nephew Tom down the steps with a bucket and a bad temper. He came back up carrying something long and grey wrapped in an oilskin, and set it on her kitchen table without a word.

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It was a skull, long-snouted and narrow as a boat's prow, its jaws hanging open the way a heron's bill does in winter. Every tooth was still in it, curved and serrated like the edge of a bread knife. Ada turned it to the window. The light came through the eye sockets and made two small suns on the oilcloth. "Not a sheep," she said. "Not a seal." Tom asked what it was. She said she didn't know, but she knew someone who would.

The museum woman from Norwich came on the Thursday bus with a clipboard and a flask of tea. She crouched by the skull for a long time, brushing the hatched grooves with a paintbrush, then laughed at herself for laughing. "Something that ate the things that ate the things," she said. "Old as the sea wall." Ada asked whether it had been lying in the cliff all this time, watching the lamp go round.

That night Ada climbed the tower one last time before the handover, the skull wrapped in her shawl under one arm, and set it on the gallery rail facing the water. The beam swept over the bone and the teeth threw their shadows out across the waves. Then she carried it back down, stair by stair, and handed it to the woman from Norwich, who promised it a proper shelf.