Black and grey sketch-style tattoo of a horned animal skull with leaves and flowers on the upper arm, shown in a black and white photograph.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Horned animal skull and leaves on upper arm

Dotwork · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A horned animal skull, seen from the side with its jaw open, fills most of the upper arm and is surrounded by sprigs of leaves and small flowers. The linework is loose and sketched, with stippled dot shading across the skull and bold solid black leaves framing the design. The image is black and white, and the background shows a blurred street and building.

Dotwork Botanical Upper arm Skull Animal skull Horn Leaves 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, and don't touch the net on that hook, it's Pritchard's and he'll have your hand off. Right. Where was I? Ah, the goat.

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Her name was Old Bramble, though nobody in Marrow Quay ever admitted to naming a goat anything so soft. She came up the slipway in the autumn of the great gale, sat on the bow of the Constance Ayre as if she owned it, and wouldn't be shifted for love nor coin. Her horns curled back over her head like the handles of a good pair of oars, and she chewed sea-kale off the harbour wall as though the sea had been a personal insult.

When she died that winter, old Tobias Venn didn't bury her. He said the cliff ground was too stony and the gulls would have her cleaner. So he left her bones up on the headland for a season, and the wind and the rooks had their way. In spring he went up with a bucket and came down with a skull as white as a bleached sail. He hung it on the chandlery wall above the tide clock. By June, thrift and sea-pinks had pushed up through the eye socket, and every morning the tide came in beneath it looking, I swear, a little more pleased with itself.

Nobody asked Venn why he kept it. I think it was the eye socket, round and patient, that stopped the men from swearing at him. Sailors will take a dead goat's advice over a live priest's any day. On the nights the wind came round to the east, you could hear the horns knock softly against the nail, like someone at the door wanting to be let in.