Black and grey linework tattoo of a pterosaur skeleton with mushrooms and a flower spanning the upper chest and shoulders.

Pterosaur skeleton and mushrooms across chest

Botanical · Chest · Black and grey · Photo

A pterosaur skeleton spreads across the upper chest, with its skull, ribcage, wing bones and clawed wing tips drawn in fine black outlines. Mushrooms, a flower, a small leaf and scattered dots fill the space around the skeleton, with some shading on the ribcage and mushroom caps. The image shows two photographs of the same chest tattoo, with only black ink and grey tones visible.

Botanical Chest Shoulder Skeleton Skull Ribcage Wing Mushroom Flower Leaf

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody in Skerry Haven would sell the bones on the cliff path, though the pedlar from Carrick offered two shillings for the skull alone. The thing had come down in the winter gale, a long grey shape wedged in the gorse above the harbour wall, its wings folded like a drying sail. Old Agnes Pellow said it had flown in from the sea, which the children took for a lie until they saw how the wing bones ended in claws as crooked as the hooks on a gaff.

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By spring the ribs had gone soft with moss, and mushrooms pushed up through them after the rain. Brown ones with frilled gills, pale ones like cups of milk, and a red-capped kind the fishwives warned their children away from. Agnes gathered what she could eat and left the rest, and she told the young harbour master that the bird was only sleeping and would wake when the tide turned.

Tom Garrow laughed at her. He laughed less when his boat, the Marigold, would not start one morning in June, though the engine was new and the tank was full. He climbed the path to find the skull turned to face the town, its long jaw open toward the water, and a ring of white mushrooms standing in the empty eye like a crown.

He went home by the tide-line without speaking. The next morning the Marigold caught on the first pull, and no one in Skerry Haven ever touched the bones again.