Geometric origami-style dinosaur tattoo with black outlines and pink, purple and teal watercolour splashes on the lower leg.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Origami dinosaur with watercolour splashes

Geometric · Calf · Colour · Photo

A long-necked dinosaur is drawn as a faceted, folded-paper shape with bold black outlines. Soft pink, purple and teal wash fills the background, with small blue and red dots scattered around the figure. The colour dominates the image, and the photo is taken straight on against a blurred dark background.

Geometric Calf Dinosaur Origami Splatter Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The frost had got into the water butt again, so Mum sent me out with the kettle and a sheet of her old greeting-card paper folded in my coat pocket. Dad was in the far shed with a ewe that wouldn't settle. I was nine, and I had decided the best use of a cold afternoon was to make a dinosaur out of nothing.

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The paper was the cheap sort that bled. I folded a long neck, a short tail and four stubby legs, and when the creases were sharp enough to nick a thumb, I dipped the whole thing in the trough where the ice had broken. The colour ran out of it like weather. Pink came off the edges first, then violet, then a teal I hadn't meant at all. When Gran knocked the paint tin with her elbow on the bench, red dots spat across the yard and landed on the sleeve of my jumper.

I held the sauropod up against the grey light over the barn door. It looked less like paper now and more like something that had been wading. Its neck had gone crooked from the wet, and I was sure it would sink. It didn't. I set it on the bottom rail of the gate, and the ewes came over to the fence one by one to look at it, their breath clouding over the top of the wood.

In the morning there was a skin of frost on everything in the yard, the tractor, the gate, the wheelbarrow with its one flat tyre. My dinosaur was still standing on the rail, stiff and bright, its neck still bent the same way. It was the only thing out there that hadn't frozen solid, and I remember thinking that it must have been holding its colours in on purpose.