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

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Bull skull with roses and feathers

Black and grey · Flash

A detailed drawing of a longhorn bull skull with its horns curving outwards, framed by two clusters of roses on the left and right and three feathers hanging below. The skull and horns are built from fine hatched and stippled linework with dark solid areas for depth. The image is monochrome black ink on a pale green background, with a centred composition.

Bull skull Horn Rose Feather

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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

The drought had taken the creek in June, and by August Ada Pruitt was counting cattle the way other women counted church pennies, twice and with her lips moving. Forty-one head remained of the sixty she had bought in spring. The old longhorn cow that had led them up from the Brazos was the first to lie down in the wash, and Eli, the hand her husband had hired on a handshake, dragged her skull up the bank with the rope still round one horn.

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She did not want it near the house. Eli nailed it to the corral post anyway, facing the road, and said a skull was a signpost for the next man that water had once been close. Ada thought it a poor sign. But the rains stayed away, and the roses she had planted along the porch in her first year, the ones the feed merchant swore would never survive out here, kept climbing. Wild turkey feathers snagged on the barbed wire, and she left them where they caught.

In September a stranger rode in on a grey mare, asking for work and water. Ada gave him the water first. He studied the skull for a long while, then the roses tangled through the bleached brow, and said the cow had died facing the hills, which was where the weather always came from. Ada didn't believe him. That evening she walked out and stood where the empty sockets looked, and the wind off the plain smelled faintly of iron.

Three days later the thunder rolled in low from the west. Eli stood in the yard with his hat in his hands, laughing like a boy. Ada climbed the post, pulled the last rose free and tucked its stem behind one curved horn, where the first rain could find it.