Colour neo-traditional tattoo of a snarling red-mouthed T-rex with olive and salmon scales, wrapping around a lower leg.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Neo-trad T-rex on a lower leg

Neo-trad · Calf · Colour · Photo

A tyrannosaurus rex with its jaws open wide, showing red gums and sharp teeth, and its tail curling up and around the top of the design. The bold dark outlines and smooth shading give the dinosaur a rounded, three-dimensional form, with clawed feet gripping the skin at the lower edge. Olive green, salmon pink and red inks dominate the colour palette against the pale skin, and the figure fills most of the frame.

Neo-trad Calf Dinosaur Teeth Claw Tail

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Tom,

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You'll laugh when you hear what got loose on the sea front last Tuesday. The Tyrant, the big painted fellow from the Dodgems end, went off his trestles in the wind and came rolling down the prom like a barrel with a grudge. Mrs Keane saw him first and fainted clean into the chip fat. I've told the council it was the gulls.

He's not really a beast, you understand. Your mother bought him off a bankrupt circus in 1938 for four pounds and a crate of Woodbines, and she painted the teeth herself, red at the gums so the kiddies would scream properly. The tail is hinged with a bicycle chain. The claws are real brass, nicked from a ship's chandler in Fleetwood. He has been terrifying the Lancashire coast ever since, which is more than I can say for most of us.

So there I was on the sand at dawn, with the tide creeping up his green flanks and his jaws wide open at the sky, and I thought, well, Ernest, this is the last of the old show. Then the lads from the lifeboat came over the dunes with a tow rope and a flask, and we hauled him back up the slipway between us, swearing like sailors. Nobody was hurt except my pride and one of the claws, which I've bent straight with a hammer.

I'm sending you a snapshot. He looks a proper wicked thing, doesn't he? Come home for the August bank holiday and help me put him back on his plinth. The old girl would have wanted it.

Your loving dad, Ernest