Neo-traditional style illustration of a bison head built from layered mandala patterns in orange, teal and red, set within a decorative border.

Ornate bison head mandala illustration

Neo-trad · Colour · Flash

A frontal bison head with curved white horns sits at the centre of the composition, its face and brow filled with layered, symmetrical ornamental patterns. The linework is dense and precise, with stippled grey shading in the background and fine dotted detail across the fur and frame. Orange, teal, red and brown dominate the palette, with a cream margin and a patterned border framing the whole piece.

Neo-trad Horn Mandala Ornament Frame Pattern

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, the lot of you, the bread's not going anywhere and neither am I. Mr Cathcart, that's the good glass you're holding, so mind it. Tonight I'll tell the one about the bison with the silver horns, because your mother asked for it at her own wedding and I never got round to telling it.

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Out past the salt flats there was a bison called Harrow whose face had grown so thick with carved pattern that the herders swore they could read the seasons off his brow. Every ring on his forehead was a year. Every dot was something he had forgotten and kept anyway. Each evening he walked the edge of the valley, and each evening a girl named Ottilie watched him from the top of the wall with a bone needle and a pot of red dye, waiting for the frayed bits to come loose so she could mend them.

One autumn she asked him why he let her do it. He said a border only tells you where you stop and somebody else starts, and he was too proud to admit he was tired of standing in the middle of his own patterns. So she took her needle to the very centre of his brow, where all the lines met, and she left one circle unfilled. Ottilie said it was for the thing nobody had yet decided to carve.

The herders say that circle is still there under the fur, and that couples who come down to the spring to drink stand inside it for a moment before they go home. So when the two of you walk out of here tonight, leave the middle of yourselves open. Somebody will want to stand there.