Black line drawing of a bull skull with an ornate floral pattern on the forehead and teal feathers hanging from each side, shown as a standalone design.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Bull skull with feathers design

Mixed · Flash

The image shows a bull skull with curved horns, drawn in solid black with a decorative floral filigree filling the forehead area. Two teal feathers with black detailing hang from the sides of the skull. The design is shown on a plain white background, with bold black shapes and flat teal fills.

Bull skull Horn Feather Floral ornament Filigree Skull

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Odile Varley had been pricing the contents of her late brother's shed for three days when the auctioneer's boy pulled the skull from a feed sack behind the lawnmower. Bleached horns, a forehead gone lacy where some patient hand had worked the bone with a dental pick, and two teal feathers wired to the cheekbones with fishing line. "Lot forty-one?" the boy asked, holding it up like a fish he wasn't sure was dead. Odile said she would think about it.

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Dennis had shoed horses in Swaledale for forty years and never once mentioned a bull. He had married late, to a widow called Hester who kept the sweet shop on Market Street and sold pear drops by weight to anyone who would stand still long enough. Hester had died in March. Dennis had followed her in August without any fuss, leaving behind a tidy kitchen, a sour dog and a shed full of things nobody had asked him to keep.

The feed sack held a folded page torn from a seed catalogue. On the back, in Hester's looping hand, someone had written: For when the wind goes round to the west. Odile read it twice, then looked at the feathers, which were still bright, as if the paint had been kept out of the sun. Nobody in Swaledale would have paid good money for an unwanted skull, and nobody had.

She wired the thing above the kitchen door that evening, where the draught from the yard would catch the feathers. When the back door swung open the plumes lifted and settled, lifted and settled. On the auction sheet she wrote Not for sale, crossed it out, and wrote it again in capitals.