Black and grey dotwork tattoo of an animal skull with long canine teeth, with an arrow running vertically through it, on a person's lower leg.

Animal skull pierced by an arrow on a calf

Dotwork · Calf · Black and grey · Photo

A carnivore-style animal skull with long canine teeth is centred on the lower leg, with an arrow running vertically through it from a fletched end at the top to a pointed tip below. The skull is shaded with stippled dotwork texture, with bold black outlines and solid black in the nasal cavity and arrow fletching. The tattoo is rendered only in black and grey ink, set symmetrically against pale skin and a dark background.

Dotwork Traditional Calf Skull Animal skull Arrow Teeth Fangs

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Tuesday, the road out past Caliche Wells. It was hot enough that the tar gave up under my boots, and the lorry's temperature needle sat on the red all the way from Bardon. Ruth made me stop at the cattle grid because she'd seen something pale in the scrub. It was a skull, and not a dog's either. The upper canines curved like sickles, and the eye sockets were wide enough to fit two thumbs.

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Ruth had an ash arrow in her satchel, one of the shafts her brother fletches for the archery club back home. She said the skull had come to us from a hunter who never came back for it. I told her that was nonsense. She held the arrow up against the sun and showed me the gap where the nose had been, and the point would have gone straight through into the roof of the mouth, as neat as a key in a lock. Then she laughed and said it was a sign we ought to keep going.

We drove on with the skull wrapped in my spare shirt on the passenger seat. Every few miles Ruth lifted the cloth and looked at it as if it might ask her something. At the Coyote Flats petrol station the attendant didn't look at the skull at all, only at the arrow, and said a ranger had been asking after a man who went walking with a bow last spring.

I've left the skull on the dashboard with the arrow still through it. Ruth says we'll bury it at the next dry wash, but I think she likes how the sun comes through the teeth and lays little bars across the vinyl. Tonight the sky over the flats is full of stars, and the arrow's shadow runs across the road like a surveyor's line.