Black and grey ink drawing of a longhorn bull skull with an ornate filigree pattern on the forehead, flanked by two roses and hanging feathers.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Bull skull with roses and feathers

Blackwork · Black and grey · Flash

A black and grey drawing of a longhorn bull skull, with curling horns and an ornate filigree pattern across the forehead. Two roses sit on either side of the skull, and feathers hang from beneath them. The skull is shaded with fine stippling and hatching, and the design is centred on a plain white background.

Blackwork Botanical Bull skull Skull Rose Feather Filigree Ornament

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dad had the skull on the tailgate when I came out to the wash, horns still crusted with red dust and one tip chipped where the coyotes had worked at it. He said the old longhorn had walked the same track to the water hole for nineteen years, and had finally lain down in the shade of the mesquite as if it had made up its mind about something.

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Mum took it into the kitchen and spent the whole of that winter on it. She used a darning needle and a bottle of black ink, working the forehead in slow curls, a lacework she said she'd seen on her grandmother's wedding veil. The roses came off the fence at the bottom of the lane, the ones nobody had pruned since Grandad died, and she bound them either side of the bone with fence wire. The feathers were from the hawk that broke its neck on the cattle grid in October.

By April the dust had come in off the flats, a brown wall that took the windmill and half the boundary fence. The skull stayed on its nail above the back door, the one thing on the place that didn't rattle. I sat beneath it with the lamp lit and counted the holes in the lacework, the way you count stitches when sleep won't come.

When the rain finally arrived in May it came sideways and loud, and Mum flung the door wide so we could smell it. Water ran off the horns in two bright threads, slid down into the filigree and pooled in every curl before finding its way out again. Mum laughed, and the lamp guttered out, and in the dark the skull went on letting the rain through its pattern.