Black and grey dotwork tattoo of a bull skull with crescent moon, arrows and overlapping circles on the back of a lower leg.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Bull skull with arrows on a calf

Dotwork · Calf · Black and grey · Photo

A bull skull with horns sits at the centre of the design, decorated with a crescent moon, small dotted ornaments and a flower motif on the forehead and jaw. Three arrows run vertically above and beside the skull, with thin linework circles and an arrow tip below, framing the motif. The piece is rendered in black ink and grey shading built from fine dots and lines, on a surface that is shown against a pale fabric background.

Dotwork Geometric Calf Bull skull Arrow Crescent moon Circle Ornament Flower

Find an artist for this

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 herd had gone over the ridge at dawn, and Ysolt was the only one left to bring the old bull home before the snow closed the passes. She found him in the reeds below the spring, his great skull lying bleached where the wolves had been and gone. The horns still curved up like a crescent, and the crescent moon of the valley people had been cut into the bone of his brow by some hand long dead, a sign for the night's keeper to watch by.

Keep reading

She knelt and brushed the grit from the jaw, where the dotted marks ran in rows like seed scattered on frost. Three arrows had been fitted through the thong at his neck when he was young, and they still held, their shafts gone grey, their points turned downward toward the earth. Her grandmother had told her that a bull's skull kept the herd's path open. The arrows showed you which way to walk, and the circles drawn around them showed you where the walking would end.

She lifted the skull onto her shoulder. It weighed less than she expected, as if the bone had been hollowed out by all the winters it had spent listening. At the ridge she stopped and looked back. The spring had frozen over in a perfect ring, and the first flakes were settling on it, filling the arrows' shadows one by one.

She did not look for the herd again. She simply turned her feet toward the low fires of the village, following the points of the arrows down the slope, and the snow came on behind her, softening the trail until nobody could have said which way she had gone.