Black and grey blackwork and dotwork tattoo of a horned animal skull framed by fine geometric lines on the forearm.

Horned animal skull with geometric lines

Blackwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A horned animal skull, possibly a goat or antelope, fills the centre of the image with detailed shading and stippled dot texture on the bone and horns. Fine black linework forms a triangle and crossing lines behind the skull, with a small angular mark above the brow. The tattoo is in greyscale on a forearm photographed against a plain pale wall.

Blackwork Dotwork Geometric Forearm Skull Animal skull Horn Goat Triangle Geometric line Frame

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The goat came down off Shepherd's Fell in the first week of February, when the snow had crusted hard enough to walk on and the flock was already thin. Nobody in Hollin Cross had seen a billy that size since the war. Tom Ackroyd found it dead by the drystone wall at the top of Scar Lane, horns sweeping back like the handles of a plough, and he carried the head down in a sack because his wife would not have the thing in the yard.

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Mrs Ruth Pell, who kept the post office and knew more of other people's business than the vicar, said the skull had to be laid out properly or the lane would never settle. So they boiled it in the copper behind the chapel, scraped it white with a borrowed knife, and she drew three lines on the brow with a pencil, one from each horn to the other, and a fourth that met them at the nose. Tom asked what the cross was for. She said it was the shape the three roads made at the mill, and that a thing which had walked all of them ought to be let rest where they met.

They buried it at the crossroads under the hawthorn on the first thaw, facing the fell, because Ruth said a goat always wants to see where it came from. That spring the lambing was clean for the first time in anyone's memory. Children learned to find their way home by the old hawthorn, and by the three peaks the miller cut into the bark above the place where the skull lay.

Tom's boy, grown and gone to Leeds, wrote home every Christmas and asked whether the goat was still facing the hill. Ruth answered yes until she died, and then the postmaster's daughter did the same, because nobody in Hollin Cross had ever been willing to turn it round.