Black ink flash drawing of three dinosaur skulls, a T-rex, a triceratops and a raptor, each entwined with flowers and leaves, in a stippled botanical style.

Three dinosaur skulls with botanical vines

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

Three dinosaur skulls are arranged diagonally down the page: a large predator skull at the top, a horned skull in the centre and a smaller raptor-like skull at the bottom. Each skull is drawn in fine stippling and crosshatched linework with detailed bone texture, and trailing flowers, leaves and vines grow around them. The image is entirely black ink on a white background, with no shading in colour and no body part shown.

Botanical Dotwork Skull Flower Leaves Vine Botanical

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The steward's girl found the third skull on the morning the bindweed came up through the chapel flags. It lay face down in the nettles where the east wall had fallen, a long narrow jaw with teeth like a row of broken knives, and a small white flower had opened in the socket of its eye. Her mother said the old lord had kept three such heads in the keep, one for each beast his grandfather had killed on the moor, and that when the roof came in the heads went out into the weather and were forgotten.

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Nobody believed the flowers were anything but weeds until the summer the river dried. The big horned skull, which had sat on the well-kerb since before anyone's memory, sprouted a crown of pale leaves that smelled of rain. The spiked one that had hung above the gate put out a climbing stem as thick as a thumb, and it wound down the stones and over the sill of the bakehouse, and where it went the bread rose higher than it had any right to.

The steward's girl carried a cutting of the vine up to the lord's grandson, who was still in his bed with a fever and a grudge. He asked her what the beasts had wanted. She said, as far as she could tell, the beasts had wanted to be somewhere green, and the vines had simply taken them there.

He laughed until he coughed, then sent for a spade. They dug out the three skulls, scrubbed them in the millrace, and set them in a ring on the hill where the old hunting lodge stood. By harvest the hill was thick with blossom, and the children of the valley swore the bones grew a little more every year, and that if you sat quiet among them at dusk you could hear them breathing out through their nostrils, slow as a tide.