Black and grey dotwork tattoo of a dinosaur skull with long teeth on the inner upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dinosaur skull on the upper arm

Dotwork · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A dinosaur skull in profile, with an open jaw and rows of pointed teeth, is tattooed on the inner upper arm. The bone is built up with fine stippled dots and solid black areas in the eye and nasal openings, giving it volume. The skull sits centrally on a pale arm against a dark background, and the image is in black and grey.

Dotwork Upper arm Dinosaur Skull Teeth Bone

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The jaw came free on a Tuesday, which Hal said was bad luck for anything that had waited seventy million years to be looked at. I had been at the matrix for three weeks, working the grey mudstone off the left side with a dental pick and a brush I kept in my shirt pocket, until the bone underneath turned the colour of weak tea and then, all at once, the colour of ash.

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The eye sockets were the worst. They were packed solid with rock so fine it clung to my gloves like flour, and I had to go in with a bamboo stylus, a grain at a time, to keep from cracking the thin plates that divided one hollow from the next. The teeth were easier. There were twenty-six of them along the upper row, pointed and curved back like bent nails, and each one I cleaned felt like counting something that had been lost on purpose.

Hal wanted the surface left rough. He said the public would trust a skull that looked dug up rather than polished, so I stippled the bone instead, tapping tiny pits into the ridges with a needle until the light caught them the way it would on a real fossil. On the last afternoon, lifting dust from the nasal opening, I found a replacement tooth still half-buried in its socket, small and unfinished, its tip no thicker than a grain of rice. Some animals never stopped growing their next set. I considered it for a long time, the pick in my hand, before I put the brush back in my pocket.

When I left, the skull sat on its foam cradle by the window with its jaw hanging open toward the door, the way it had lain in the ground. I didn't tell Hal about the tooth. I thought it was the only part of the animal still expecting something.