Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Reptile skull tattoo on a forearm

Realism · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A reptile skull is shown in side profile, with a long snout, lined teeth and detailed eye sockets. The skull is rendered with fine linework and soft grey shading that gives it depth and a bony texture. It sits centrally on the forearm against a plain, pale grey wall.

Realism Forearm Skull Teeth Animal skull

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You have been told not to touch the crate that came up on the Lynn barge, stamped with a merchant's name no one at the abbey will say aloud. Brother Porter has nailed the lid shut twice. You lever it open with the kitchen cleaver on a wet Tuesday, and packed in straw and sacking lies a skull as long as your forearm, a reptile's, its snout narrowing like a bread knife, its jaw lined with teeth set in neat, ugly rows.

Keep reading

Brother Anselm, who keeps the infirmary and most of the abbey's opinions, declares it a dragon's relic and forbids you to draw it. You draw it anyway, on the back of the psalter inventory, shading the eye sockets with the stub of charcoal until they look deep enough to lose a thumb in. Each evening you take the lamp down to the undercroft and sit with it. The fen gives back what it swallows every spring, Brother Ivo says, and you think of the hunter that must have lain under the reeds, its jaw working through the shallows, waiting for something slow enough to take.

The Abbot asks you to complete the inventory before the feast. You write one skull, reptile, unidentified. He reads it, takes your pen, and adds: of the Lord's making, and of great antiquity. You do not argue. You carry the skull up the stone stairs at midnight and set it on the sill of the east window, where the moon lays silver across the water. Nothing in the house will ever be quite so honest about its teeth.

At Lauds the sill is empty. Out on the flats the reeds are bent in a long, unhurried line toward the channel, and the mud at the bank holds a print the width of a cart wheel. You decide, for once, to write nothing down.