Black and grey realism style tattoo of a skeletal raptor dinosaur running across the upper back near the shoulder blade, shown in two photos.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skeletal raptor dinosaur on a shoulder

Realism · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a dinosaur skeleton in a raptor-like pose, with an arched neck, long tail, clawed feet and visible ribs and limb bones. It is rendered in black and grey with soft shading that gives the bones some depth against the skin. The design runs diagonally across the upper back and shoulder, and the image pairs an angled view with a closer view.

Realism Shoulder Dinosaur Skeleton Bone Tail Claw

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Alfie,

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The sign painter has gone off with the last of the takings, so the Barrow and Daughter Travelling Menagerie now reads "Barrow & Daughr" in letters a foot high, and I have decided that is the kind of honesty people pay sixpence for. Dad would have had a fit. He would also have sold the raptor by now, which is why I haven't.

You remember it: the velociraptor we bought off a bankrupt museum in Leeds, sixty bones wired to a steel frame, crated in the back of the horse box since your wedding. Nobody in the tent ever looked at the lions. They looked at the raptor, neck up and tail out, as if it had just heard the gate open and was deciding whether to run. Mrs Pargeter's boy used to stand in front of it copying the pose until his mum called him off.

Last Tuesday, in the rain at Market Drayton, I finally pulled the cover off to check the joints. Half the ribs had come loose from the spine. I sat on an upturned bucket with a tin of Brasso and a dental pick and spent four hours putting it back together, one small bone at a time, while the wind tried to take the canvas. By dusk it stood pale against the grey, and I caught myself talking to it. Idiot.

A man came by with a card from a museum in Nottingham offering four hundred pounds. I said no, and I'm still not sure why. Maybe because it is the last thing in the yard that still moves when the wind blows through it. Come home for the autumn fair and bring the good glue.

Love, Nell