Colour neo-traditional tattoo of a desert scene inside a heart on an arm, with a cactus, prickly pear, bull skull, crescent moon and stars.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Desert scene with bull skull in a heart

Neo-trad · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A bull skull sits at the bottom of a heart-shaped panel filled with a desert scene. A tall cactus, a prickly pear cluster and a crescent moon with small stars appear against a red, orange and purple gradient sky. Bold outlines frame the bright colour fills, and the composition is centred and compact.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Nell, the bull skull is still on the windowsill where Dad left it, horns bleached the colour of old piano keys. I finally carried it down to the wash this morning and found the heat had got there before me, so I sat on the tailgate with my boots off and let the sky do its thing. You would have hated the sunset. It went from tangerine to a bruised purple in about four minutes, the way it always does out here, and then the first star came out over the ridge like someone had pushed a pin through the dark.

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Then the coyotes started, and I thought about what Dad said about the prickly pear, that you can eat the fruit if you singe the spines off first and nobody ever tells you that part until you have already grabbed one. He had a scar on his thumb the shape of a comma from learning that. I kept meaning to ask him what else he had learned the hard way, and now the only one who knows is a cattle skull on a windowsill.

Last night I went out to the old corral with the big torch and cut a path through the scrub to the tall cactus by the fence, the one he measured himself against every August. It was taller than the fence by then. I stood under it and tried to work out how many years of rain that took, and gave up around the time the crescent moon came up thin as a fingernail, as if it had the same errand as me.

I'm staying through the harvest. Come if you can. Bring the good tape measure, and the stupid hat.

Love, Ruthie

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