Colour botanical tattoo of a longhorn skull surrounded by succulents, lavender and trailing thyme on the outer thigh.

Longhorn skull with succulents on a leg

Botanical · Thigh · Colour · Photo

A longhorn skull sits at the centre of the design, with its pale bone and tan horns shaded in soft greys. Succulent rosettes in grey and green, sprigs of lavender and trailing thyme-like vines fill the space around it. The green and grey shading is smooth and blended, and the composition wraps around the limb.

Botanical Thigh Skull Succulent Lavender Vine Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The drought had lasted three summers when Mercy Tolan found the longhorn skull bleached white under the mesquite, its horns still wide enough to hang a lantern from. Her father said to leave it where it lay. The cattle were gone, the well was a hole with a bucket in it, and there was nothing left in that country worth burying.

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Mercy did not bury it. She carried it up the slope on her hip, one horn knocking her thigh at every step, and set it on the flat rock above the house. Then she went down to the wash where the succulents grew fat on nothing, pale green fists of them, and dug them out with a spoon. She carried them up in her apron. She pushed them into the eye sockets and the gaps where the teeth had been, tucked thyme into the cracks, and set lavender in the hollows where the old garden had once been before the bore dried.

Her father came to the edge of the yard at dusk and said she was making a grave for a cow. She said it wasn't a grave. By the second week the rosettes had swollen and the vines had crept over the brow and down the rock, and the rain came, not much, just enough to fill the trough. Folk in the next county said the skull had gone to seed. Mercy only said that a thing which had given up its meat for the herd ought to be let feed something too.

The sky stayed grey most afternoons after that. Her father stopped calling it a cow's grave and began leaving his hat on the rock when he came in from the fields. When visitors asked what it was for, he told them to ask the horns.