Grey and green tattoo of a horned bull skull framed by succulents and sprigs of lavender on the calf.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Bull skull with succulents on a leg

Botanical · Calf · Mixed · Photo

A horned bull skull sits at the centre of this tattoo, with succulent rosettes and thin botanical sprigs growing around and over it. The skull and foliage are shaded in soft greys with smooth, blended tones, and muted green is used for the leaves and stems. The design wraps around the leg and fills the frame, with the skull placed in the middle and the plants spreading outwards.

Botanical Realism Calf Bull skull Horn Succulent Lavender Botanical Sprig Flower

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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

Mind the step, it's loose, same as my brother's teeth. You want the story of the bull, or the story of the cuttings? They're the same story if you're patient. The creek quit in the dry year, the summer the sky went the colour of old tin, and Hollis Vane came up our track with a sack of succulent cuttings on his shoulder like a dead lamb.

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He'd heard old Ferris had a bull that walked the whole valley looking for water, then lay down on the shale at the boundary wire. Ferris was too proud to shoot it and too poor to feed it, so the bull stayed where it fell and the crows took their time. A week later, when the flesh had gone, Hollis knelt by the skull and said those horns were the finest he'd seen in forty years on the stock routes. He wanted to push the cuttings into the eye sockets. I told him he was a fool. He did it anyway, and by the first rain every socket had a green rosette spilling out of it, fat as a fist, and sprigs of lavender had come up through a crack in the brow as if someone had been sent to tidy the mess.

Ferris sold up the next spring and the new people pulled the wire down. Hollis wrapped the skull in a feed sack and carried it eleven miles to his own yard, one hand under the horns, stopping at every dry creek bed to let it see the water. Some nights I still hear him out there talking to it as if it were a neighbour who owed him money. The succulents, I'll tell you, have outlived every one of us who ever crossed that boundary.