Black and grey dotwork stegosaurus tattoo with a bold outline on the lower leg, with a partial dark tattoo visible at the top of the frame.

Stegosaurus tattoo on a lower leg

Dotwork · Calf · Black and grey · Photo

A stegosaurus walks in profile across the skin, with a row of leaf-shaped back plates, a spiked tail and a small head facing right. The bold black outline is filled with stippled dotwork shading that gives the body and plates their texture. The tattoo is in black and grey ink, centred on a pale leg against a dark background.

Dotwork Calf Dinosaur

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

Every August the windfalls came down faster than the Pickerings could gather them, and that was the year the old beast came up out of the river meadow to eat them. Nobody in Hobb's Cross had seen its like. It walked the way a barge moves on still water, low and certain, and the plates along its back stood up in neat dark leaves against the hedge.

Keep reading

Old Mrs Tully said it had been sleeping under the chalk since before the church, and that the plates were there to catch the sun and warm its blood before it went hunting. Her son Eli said it was only hungry. He was nine and believed both things at once, which is how children manage most of their facts.

On the third evening Eli carried a basket of bruised Discovery apples down to the bottom orchard and set them in a row along the stone wall. He sat on the top step and waited. The creature came slowly, its spiked tail swinging behind it like a rope being dragged, and it stopped to look at him with one small eye. Then it lowered its head and ate every apple, core and all, and when it was finished it turned and walked back toward the river without once looking round.

The next morning the basket was full of pears instead, pale and perfect, which nobody in the village had ever managed to grow. Eli kept the basket. Mrs Tully said that was the way of it, and she never told him whether she was joking.