Neo-trad tattoo of a goat skull with curved horns and an orange chrysanthemum on the forearm, set against an orange sun.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Goat skull and chrysanthemum on a forearm

Neo-trad · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A bold outlined goat or antelope skull with long curved horns sits above an orange chrysanthemum with dark green leaves. A pale orange sun disc sits behind the skull, and a small yellow-green leaf appears beside the horns. The colour is bright and mostly flat, with grey-green shading on the skull and black used for outlines and the background.

Neo-trad Japanese Forearm Skull Horn Chrysanthemum Flower Sun Leaf

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The fair pulled out of Hadley Green the morning after the first frost, and the goat's skull rode at the front of the lead wagon wrapped in a flannel shirt. Nobody in the convoy would touch it. Dell Marrow, who ran the coconut shy and was afraid of very little, said the horns still held the cold of the mountain where the animal had died, and that was reason enough to keep the box shut.

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The story went that the goat had belonged to a hill farmer's widow who sold her flock to clear a debt and kept only the one old billy, who would not be parted from her. When the debt came for the cottage, she walked him up to the ridge at dusk and left him there. The farmer's boy found the skull in spring with a chrysanthemum growing from the jaw, which no one could explain, since chrysanthemums do not grow on ridges.

The fair took the skull on as a sideshow prop, and for a season the roundabout ran true and the dogs stopped biting. Then the widow's grandson came to the Michaelmas fair, a thin man with a pocket watch, and asked for the skull back. Dell said no. He said the wagons would not reach Thorne before dark, and they did not. The sun went down red over the Hadley road, and the horns caught the last of it.

Dell opened the box that night and found the flower had come back on the bone, orange as a lamp, and the grandson's watch lying in the straw beside it. She buried the watch at the crossroads and drove on without looking back, because a fair that keeps its luck has to pay something for it, and everyone on the road knows that.