Pink cartoon raptor peering over lilac banners that read CHAOS IS WHAT KILLED THE DINOSAURS, DARLING, on a pale pink background.

Pink raptor with lilac banner lettering

Colour · Flash

A flat, cartoon-style drawing of a pink raptor looking over a series of lilac ribbon banners bearing the words CHAOS IS WHAT KILLED THE DINOSAURS, DARLING in black capitals. The linework is bold and even with simple flat fills and no shading. The palette is limited to pink, lilac and black on a pale pink background, with the figure and banners centred in the composition.

Dinosaur Banner Ribbon Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lift at Coldharbour Court stopped answering its buttons the spring the pink raptor came up from the drains. Nobody saw it arrive. The caretaker, Mr Idris Bell, swore it had been living under the boiler room since the eighties, basking on the flue like a hot water bottle, and that he had written to the council about it twice and received no reply.

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It did not eat the residents. It ate the pigeons, and the odd packet of crisps left on a windowsill, and it read the notices on the lobby board with its head tilted as if it disapproved of the spelling. When the residents' association met in the laundry room to vote on whether it should be removed, the raptor climbed onto the spin dryer and waited. Everyone agreed it was a very well-mannered creature for something that had been extinct for sixty-six million years.

Maureen from flat 41 stood up and called it a menace. The raptor looked at her for a long time. Maureen sat down rather quickly and asked whether there were biscuits. Later she said that chaos was not a thing you could put to a show of hands, and that the creature had seemed to agree with her, which was worse.

The following Monday, someone had painted a banner along the stairwell wall in careful black capitals, with the raptor's pale shape curled beneath it. Mr Bell said the council had not approved it. Maureen said she had always known. The lift has worked perfectly ever since, and nobody has been brave enough to ask it to stop.