Black ink pen drawing of a dinosaur head with a exposed skeletal skull and spine overgrown with thin tendrils, shaded with fine stippled dots and textured scales.

Dinosaur skull with tendrils pen drawing

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

A detailed monochrome drawing of a dinosaur head in profile, with the upper skull and spine exposed as bone while the lower head and neck are covered in scales. Shading is built from fine stippled dots and short hatched lines, with thin branching tendrils growing over the skull and spine. The subject is centred on white paper, with two Micron pens placed in the top left corner.

Dotwork Dinosaur Skull Spine Scale Tendril Teeth Bone

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the lot of you, and mind the fire, it has a temper like your uncle. You know the cliff at Skerra Nab, where the gulls won't nest? My grandmother's grandmother saw the sea go out so far that autumn it left the bottom of the world showing, and in the mud below the cliff lay a thing with its head turned to the sky. Not a whale. Not a boat. A beast with a long jaw like a heron's beak, rows of teeth, and a spine running back along the rock like stacked coins.

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The men wanted to break it up for the lime kilns. Old Tam Carrick took his mallet down there the first morning, and he came back up the path with his hand held out in front of him, saying the bone was warm. Nobody believed him until they went down themselves and found it was, warm as a loaf. The scales on its throat were still soft, the way a hen's feet are soft before they harden in the pot.

That night the roots came. Thin white threads, like the stuff that grows on a forgotten potato, crawled out of the sockets and up the bones and over the crown of its skull until the whole head looked like a net hauled up empty. Tam swore it was reaching for the village. Then he noticed the threads only ever grew upward, toward the rain, away from the sea.

So they left it be. The sea came back, and the beast stayed where it lay, breathing slow beneath the weed, and the island has kept its own counsel ever since. Now. Who wants to count its teeth? Go on, you can count them tomorrow, when the tide is out and the lamps are lit.