Pencil-style drawing of a bull skull with wrapped horns, hanging feathers and a red eight-pointed star on the forehead, shown as a tattoo design.

Bull skull with feathers and red star

Mixed · Flash

A detailed pencil drawing of a bull or buffalo skull seen from the front, with horns wrapped in bands and cords and two feathers hanging from each horn. A red eight-pointed star sits on the forehead, with small red and purple accents on the horns and beads. The shading is soft grey with fine hatched detail on the feathers and horns, set on a plain white background.

Skull Bull skull Horn Feather Star Bead Cord

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The skull was already on the trestle table when Nell came in with the seating plan, propped between two jam jars of cow parsley as if someone had meant it for a centrepiece. Its horns were bound in grey cord, and two feathers hung from each one, stiff and dusty. Her Uncle Tom stood beside it with his cap in his hands, looking like a man who had been told to move a sheep and had found it had already moved itself.

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Gwen's mother had seen it at half past seven and rung twice. A bull's skull at a wedding, she said, was bad luck, or at the very least the sort of thing people would photograph. Tom said it had hung on the barn wall since his father's day, that the star on its brow had been painted the spring his father came home from the war, and that it was not going anywhere until somebody could tell him why a bride needed it moved. Nobody could, so the argument went round the kitchen twice and ended with the kettle.

In the evening Nell carried the skull down to the bottom field, while the swifts screamed over the hedge. She wiped the forehead with her sleeve and found the red had faded to a pale pink ghost. There was a tin of old enamel in the car boot, the same red as the pillar box at the crossroads, so she painted the star again, eight points, one stroke at a time, with the lid of the tin for a palette. By the time she finished, the sun had dropped behind the ridge and the bone had that dusk glow, as if it had been lit from inside.

Gwen came down the path in her wellies, carrying her shoes. She looked at it for a long time and said the star looked like a compass that had decided to be brave. On the morning of the wedding it sat on the windowsill of the barn, and the light came through the glass and turned the red star into something that pointed, plainly and without fuss, towards the door.