Shaded bull skull with curved horns inside a dreamcatcher hoop with beads and two hanging feathers, tattooed on the upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Bull skull and dreamcatcher on the upper back

Realism · Back · Mixed · Photo

A bull skull with long curved horns sits at the centre of a dreamcatcher hoop, with two feathers hanging below on strings of beads. The skull is shaded in grey with soft highlights and dark recesses around the eye sockets, while the hoop is rendered in orange-brown wood tones. The beads are blue and red, and the feathers are shaded grey-green, set against a plain, close-cropped view of the skin.

Realism Back Bull skull Horn Dreamcatcher Feather Bead

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

By the fourth day out of Galveston the hold stank of wet straw, and Owen Pell had stopped pretending he could sleep through the lowing. He walked the pens at night with a shuttered lantern, counting heads the way his mother counted stitches. The old red bull in pen seven had gone down in the swell, and the mate ordered it over the side before the sun came up. Owen had not wanted to see it go, so he kept the skull instead, its horns still wide enough to span his two arms.

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He carried it up to the forecastle wrapped in sacking and set it on the locker beside his bunk. Ruth Abney, the cook's girl, had pressed a dreamcatcher into his hand on the quay, a willow hoop bound with orange cord, two grey feathers hanging beneath on strings of blue and red beads. 'Keeps the bad dreams off,' she'd said, then gone red, as if she had said too much. Owen hung it from a nail above the skull and lay listening to the timbers tick. The hoop turned slowly in the lantern light, its web catching the horns.

In the second week the wind came round hard from the north-west. The ship rolled until the beasts threw themselves against the boards, and the mate sent word that Owen was to sleep in the galley. When he came back at dawn, the feathers had torn loose and were gone across the deck, but the willow ring still hung from its nail, and the bull's skull lay on the locker with its dark eye sockets turned to the door.

He pulled one feather from the scuppers and tucked it into the band of his cap. At the next port he would tell the agent the count was right, one bull short, and say nothing of the skull or the girl who had tied the beads.