Black and grey dotwork and fine line bull skull tattoo with crossed arrows and a crescent moon on the back of a leg, framed by thin geometric circles.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Bull skull with arrows and moon on a leg

Dotwork · Calf · Black and grey · Photo

A bull skull with curved horns sits at the centre of the design, with arrows above and below and a crescent moon on the brow. The skull is shaded with dense dotwork and finer lines, while thin geometric circles and a vertical dotted line frame it. The tattoo is entirely black ink in shades of grey against pale skin, on a plain light background.

Dotwork Geometric Calf Bull skull Arrow Crescent moon Horn Circle Geometric frame

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The skull came up in Davey's creel the week before the relief boat stopped coming, a bull's head bleached to the colour of old candle wax, both horns still on it. He wanted to throw it back. I said the sea had sent it to us for a reason, and he laughed at me across the lamp room with his mouth full of bread.

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We scrubbed it with vinegar and salt on the flat rock below the gallery steps. Under the grime the brow was smooth as a plate, so I took my grandmother's pencil from the tin on the shelf and drew a crescent moon there, the way she used to mark the spring tides in her almanac. Davey said that was daft. Then he took the pencil and drew two arrows crossing above the eyes, one for each of us, he said, though he never explained which was which.

The logbook has no column for that sort of thing, so I wrote it under the weather: skull set on sill, lamp lit at dusk. The beam went out over the water the way it always does, but when it swept back round, the horns threw two long shadows across the glass like a pair of arrows loosed at the mainland. Davey stood very still and watched them go.

In March the relief boat came back for him and not for me. I kept the skull on the sill. Every night I light the lamp and turn my back to the window, so the horns can throw their shadows across the room where nobody else will see.