Black linework flash design of a cartoon T-rex with feathered crest and leafy wreath, with the words We Need More Teeth, drawn in fine line on paper.

T-rex with leaves and We Need More Teeth

Fine line · Black and grey · Flash

A pen drawing of a side-facing tyrannosaurus with an open mouth, a feathered crest and stippled skin texture, set beside the words WE NEED MORE TEETH. A wreath of leaves and sprigs curves around the upper right of the composition. The work is in black ink on pale paper with fine line detail and light dotted shading, with no colour.

Fine line Botanical Dinosaur Leaves Feather Lettering Wreath

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

Mrs Ada Pell had been running the wool shop on Tanner Lane for thirty-one years when the tyrannosaur came in through the back, dragging a bale of nettles behind it like a dog with a stick. Nobody in Hollin Cross had seen one before, though nobody said so. It simply stood among the bobbins with its head lowered, a crest of fern fronds bristling above its skull, and waited to be served.

Keep reading

It wanted thread. Green, it wanted, though it made no sound, only snorted at the swatches Ada held up until she found the colour of cut hazel. She wound a skein for it. The creature turned the skein over with one claw, pressed its snout to the paper label, and then made a low rumble that the chapel organist later swore was a laugh. Under its breath, in the grumbling way old men talk to dogs, Ada heard it mutter that the village had grown soft, and that it had been a long time since anything in Hollin Cross had needed more teeth.

She asked what that meant. The tyrannosaur showed her, opening its jaw wide enough for her to count the whole row, each one as long as a chisel and as pale as candle wax. Then it laid a single sycamore leaf on the counter, paid with a coin nobody had minted, and walked out into the rain with the wool in its mouth.

The next morning the dentist on the high street found his door propped open and his drill missing, and a wreath of leaves hung on the surgery bell. Ada never sold anyone else a green skein again without asking first whose teeth they were for.