Pencil drawing of a ram head with curled horns and tribal-style patterning, shown as a tattoo flash design with no body placement visible.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornamental ram head design

Geometric · Black and grey · Flash

A front-facing ram head with large spiralling horns, a central feather-like crest and a shield-shaped face. The head is filled with dots, triangles, hatching and ridged line work, and a row of pointed fringe runs along the lower edge. The drawing is in graphite pencil on a white background, with no colour.

Geometric Ram Horn Animal Ornamental Tribal Feather Dot Triangle

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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

The gatehouse at Harrowell came down in the third week of frost, and the ram's head came down with it, split along the brow. I was sent up the scaffold to gather the pieces before the carters could cart them off. Old Tobias, who had worked the castle stone as a boy, swore the beast had been carved to face the road so that anyone climbing it would be counted.

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I found the horn first, a spiral as long as my forearm, its ridges worn smooth by four centuries of rain. Then the crest, a feather of stone with three dots pressed into it, and then the face itself, lying in the nettles with its fringe of pointed teeth turned up to the sky. Someone had cut triangles into the cheeks and hatched them with fine chisel strokes, and I could not tell whether the pattern was meant to frighten or to guide.

Tobias wanted the pieces broken up for hardcore, but I took a rubbing instead, laying wet paper over the brow and working graphite across it until the dots and ridges rose like a map. The rubbing hung over my table all winter. In spring I noticed the crack ran exactly along the old drovers' road, and that the carters had always slowed at the bend where the ram's eyes pointed.

We did not rebuild the gate. We set the head upright in the verge at that bend, horns clear of the hedge, and when the first wagon came past in April the driver lifted his hat to it without knowing why. I lifted mine too.