Black and grey dotwork tattoo of a bull skull with arrows and a crescent moon inside fine geometric circles, on the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Bull skull with arrows and crescent moon

Dotwork · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A bull skull with curved horns sits at the centre of the design, with an arrow above and arrows running down either side. A crescent moon and a small ornamental motif sit on the brow, and fine circles and a dotted line frame the skull. The shading is built from stippled dots and fine lines in black and grey, against plain pale skin and a white top on the left.

Dotwork Geometric Upper arm Bull skull Arrow Crescent moon Horn Circle Geometric frame Dotted line

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bull came down out of the high pasture the winter the Halloran boys stopped going to church, and it stood at the edge of the birch wood with its horns full of frost. Nobody in Ashcombe would go near it. Old Maud said it was the same beast her grandmother had seen, that it had been dead a hundred years and walked anyway, because the moon had been pressed into its brow when it fell.

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Ruth Penny went out anyway. She was nine and had been sent for eggs, and the hens had wandered past the stile into the trees. She followed them with a basket on her hip and one of her father's spare arrows tucked into her apron like a pencil. The wood was ringed with old stones, and at each ring she counted the arrows stuck in the moss. Four, then seven, then none.

At the centre sat the skull, bleached and upright on a bed of ferns, the crescent moon scratched into its brow the way a child scratches a wish into a tree. A dotted line of thorns ran from the horns down to the ground, and the hens were sitting inside it, perfectly calm.

She did not take the eggs. She laid the arrow at the skull's feet, point to the north, as her grandmother had taught her to leave a thing you meant to ask a favour of. Then she waited until the light went grey and the hens came home by themselves. The next morning her arrow was back on the windowsill, its shaft wrapped in wool, and beside it lay a single brown egg, still warm, which her father swore no hen in Ashcombe had laid.