Black and grey line drawing of a horned bull skull decorated with geometric patterns and three roses with leaves, shown as a tattoo design rather than on skin.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Bull skull with roses design

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A detailed black and white drawing of a bull skull with long curved horns, its forehead filled with dense geometric and tribal-style patterns. Three roses with shaded petals and leaves are arranged around the skull and horns, forming a symmetrical composition on a plain light grey background.

Botanical Geometric Bull skull Horn Rose Leaves Geometric pattern Ornament

Find an artist for this

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 old cattle road ran past the ruined castle of Harrowmere, and the villagers of Thornbeck would not let their children climb its walls. Everyone knew the bull that kept the gate. It had been bone for a hundred years, bleached white in the grass below the portcullis, its great curved horns still wide enough for a man to lie between. Nobody had seen it move, but the milk turned sour on the days the wind came from the north.

Keep reading

When the miller's daughter, Edith Coyle, lost her betrothed to the fever that spring, she walked up the hill at dusk with a sack of bread and a knife. She did not ask the bull for anything. She knelt in the nettles and began to scrape the dirt from its brow, where the old carvers had cut their patterns into the bone, diamonds nested in diamonds, zigzags like a river in flood. She scraped until her knuckles bled, then she wove roses from the hedge briars and pressed them into the eye sockets, one, two, three, because roses were what her mother had grown and her mother was dead too.

In the morning the milk was sweet. In the evening the roses were gone, and in their place the old castle gate stood open, its iron teeth raised, and beyond it a kitchen with a fire already lit and a kettle singing. Edith went in. She has not come out, but the bread she left on the bone is always eaten by the time the sun goes down, and the cattle drink from the trough without the sour taste.