Neo-traditional bull skull with horns, a star and feathers, framed by orange roses and teal leaves across the upper and middle back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Bull skull and roses across a back

Neo-trad · Back · Mixed · Photo

A large back piece shows a bull skull with curved horns, ornamented with a central star, geometric diamond patterns and hanging feathers. Heavy black linework and fine stippled shading define the skull, while orange roses and teal leaves surround it at the top and lower corners. Colour ink dominates the flowers and foliage, and the composition is symmetrical and fills the whole back.

Neo-trad Botanical Back Bull skull Horn Star Feather Rose Leaves Geometric pattern Mandala

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Halfway up the Kessock pass the cart wheel dropped into a rut, and Tom swore at the mule while Mara climbed the scree to see what the thaw had uncovered. The cairn stood where it always had, a heap of grey stones her grandmother had built, and on top of it, where the snow had slid away, lay the skull of an old bull. Its horns still curved out wide and pale as church candles, and someone had lashed a grey feather to each one, the quills gone brittle with weather.

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Nobody had moved it in living memory, and nobody had dared. The herders said the bull had walked the pass for thirty winters, leading flocks down ahead of storms, and when it finally lay down in the snow they cut a star from a biscuit tin and nailed it to the brow so the dead beast would keep an eye on the road. Every midsummer Ada Lowther came up from the inn with a jam jar of roses and pushed their stems between the stones. The blooms had spread across the cairn, red as embers, their leaves spilling over the bones.

Tom came up behind her with his hands on his hips. "Carlisle pays forty pound for a skull like that. Ten for the horns alone." Mara looked at the diamonds scratched into the bone, patient as a tally, each one cut by somebody who had counted the flock home. "Ada's roses will be out by Sunday," she said. "Who do you think will sell them?" He said nothing, which was how she knew he had already decided.

They left it where it lay. Mara tied a strip of her own red wool to the nearest feather, then walked down to the mule. When she looked back, the wind had lifted the feathers, and the star caught the last of the light, a small hard shine above the flowers.