Black ink drawing of a longhorn bull skull flanked by roses and feathers on a pale background, shown as a tattoo design.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Bull skull with roses and feathers

Realism · Black and grey · Flash

A bull skull with long curved horns sits at the centre, with its brow, eye sockets and muzzle drawn in fine hatching and stippled shading. Clusters of roses with leaves hang from either side of the skull, with long feathers trailing below them. The drawing is in black ink on a plain off-white background and is composed symmetrically.

Realism Botanical Bull skull Skull Rose Feather Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bull had been dead three summers when Jessamy Pike came up the Carrow road with a mule, a Bible and a box of rose cuttings wrapped in wet sacking. The first thing she did in Lost Wells was hang the skull on the church gate. Folk said it was bad luck to let bone bleach in the open. She said the bone had earned its keep and could look at the sky for a while.

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The Dunmore brothers didn't like it. Their well had gone dry in the April heat, and the old bull had stood over the one good spring for as long as anyone could remember, horns spread like a man bracing against a gale. Eli Dunmore came up the road with a shovel on his shoulder and a grievance in his mouth, and found Jessamy on her knees at the gate, tying hawk feathers to the horns with red wool. She didn't stop. She told him the spring was the bull's to guard, and the bull had not yet finished the job.

He came back every week for a month. Each time, the roses at the gate had grown another hand's height, climbing the iron and spilling over the brow of the skull until the eye sockets were full of pink petals. Each time he swore she was a witch. Each time she offered him a bucket from her own barrel and asked him to bring his brother to the church gate instead.

In October the rains came sideways off the Carrow hills and the well rose so fast it lapped the lip of its stones. When the Dunmores finally went to pull the gate down, they found the feathers still tapping against the horns in the wind, and the roses thick over the empty eyes. Nobody in Lost Wells has tried to move the bone since.