Pencil drawing of a bull skull with horns merged into an anchor, shaded in realistic black and grey, shown as a tattoo design sketch.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Bull skull and anchor design

Realism · Black and grey · Flash

A realistic pencil drawing of a bull skull with long curved horns, where the skull sits over the shank of an anchor, with the ring at the top forming the anchor's eye. The skull is rendered with fine graded shading and highlights, and the anchor flukes and shank are shaded to give them depth. The design is centred on a plain pale background in black and grey tones.

Realism Bull skull Anchor Horn

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Don't touch the skull, the cook said, and that was the first thing anyone told me aboard the Marguerite, before they gave me my bunk or told me the watch. He was a Galway man with one eye and a grudge against the Atlantic, and he kept the thing wrapped in a flour sack in the bread locker. Bull's head, bleached to the colour of a plate, horns as wide as a man's arms. I asked him where a ship's cook comes by a bull's skull. He said a sandbar off Padre Island, and then he said nothing else for three days.

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The old bosun, Tobias Keel, had dragged that sandbar in a norther and hauled the anchor up with the skull caught in its jaws, grinning out of the mud like it had been waiting for them. Keel took it for an omen. He bolted it to the shank with two copper rivets, horns out, so the ring at the top sat like an eye above the bull's brow. Nobody argued. Men who will argue with the captain about biscuit will not argue with a dead animal that has been nailed to the ship.

We lost the port anchor off Finisterre in a blow that turned the sea to slate. The Marguerite dragged toward the rocks all night, and the crew stood at the rail with their lamps shaking, watching the bull go down and come up again in the spray. At dawn the starboard anchor held. We limped into Vigo with the skull still bolted to the one that had survived, and the cook took his hat off to it on the quay.

Keel died the winter after, in his bunk, and the owners wanted the skull sold for scrap. The cook sat on the hatch with his flour sack and said the bull had earned its place. Some nights now, when the wind drops and the hull goes quiet, I hear it knocking against the stem, two dull notes, like something asking to be let in.