Black and grey blackwork tattoo of a ram skull and a deer skull with antlers, framed by leaves and a flower, on the outer thigh.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Animal skulls and leaves on a thigh

Blackwork · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A large tattoo centred on a ram skull with curled horns, flanked by a deer skull with antlers on the right and a smaller skull on the left. Leaves and a flower with dotted detail fill the background and frame the skulls. The work uses fine linework and stippled shading in black and grey, with the composition radiating outward from the central skull across the thigh.

Blackwork Dotwork Botanical Thigh Skull Antler Leaves Flower Horn Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The valley above Coldharbour had lost three shepherds to the north wind before the old woman at the top farm agreed to teach the boy how to read a skull. She did it on the kitchen table with a ram's head she had boiled clean in the copper, turning the bone in the lamplight and tracing the spiral of each horn with a blackened fingernail. Look here, she said, where the horn grows from the brow. That is where the years are kept. Every ring is a winter the animal walked through and came out of.

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He learned the deer skull next, its antlers branching like a leafless wood, and then the small skull of the fox that had been found under the hawthorn. She made him draw each one on slate with a stick of charcoal until his hands stopped shaking. Then she sent him out at dusk to bring back something that had died in the high pasture, and he came down with a sheep's skull wrapped in dock leaves, its eye sockets full of rain.

The north wind came again that winter, and this time it was the boy who went up the fell with the lantern. He found the shepherds sitting in a hollow with their dogs, cold but breathing, and he knew by the way the frost lay on their coats that they had been waiting for someone to read the signs in the snow. He brought them down one by one. When the old woman died the next spring, he hung her ram's skull over the lintel, horns to the door, and left the dock leaves to rot where they fell.