Black and grey ink drawing of a bull skull with horns, surrounded by roses, peonies, bones and ribbon banners, in a neo-traditional style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Bull skull with roses and bones design

Neo-trad · Black and grey · Flash

A drawn tattoo design on white paper showing a bull skull with curved horns at the centre. The skull is surrounded by roses, peonies, small flowers, crossed bones and ribbon banners that fill the frame. The linework is bold and outlined, with stippled and hatched shading on the petals, skull and foliage.

Neo-trad Botanical Bull skull Horn Rose Peony Flower Bone Ribbon Banner Foliage

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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

Mr Ashworth's bull died in the August heat, and Nell Crabtree was sent up the lane with a bucket of lime and a clean cloth to fetch the skull before the flies found it.

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The widow, Hannah, would not hear of a museum. "It goes in the parlour," she said, "over the piano, where he used to stand when the rain came in." Nell boiled the skull in the copper behind the dairy and bleached it white on a board in the yard. Hannah brought roses from the south wall, peonies from the cold frame, and a bundle of knuckle bones from the knacker's cart, which she laid out like cutlery. Nell sketched in pencil while the widow talked about the bull's temper, how he once took a five-barred gate off its hinges to reach a stack of late hay.

The left horn had grown heavier than the right, curling down so far it nearly touched the cheekbone. Nell thought about correcting it, then didn't. She inked the horn in heavy lines and let a rose open in its curve, and when Hannah saw it she went quiet and asked for nothing else changed.

The drawing hung over the piano for thirty years. On wet afternoons the stippled petals seemed to darken, and the skull looked as if it were pushing up through the flowers, as if the garden had been asked to carry him and had decided, at last, to let him stand.