Black line drawing of a ram's head with a triangle eye on its forehead, framed by two roses, in a neo-traditional style, shown as an unshaded design on paper.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ram head with eye and roses design

Neo-trad · Black and grey · Flash

A black line drawing shows a ram's head in profile with large curled horns, a detailed beard and a triangle containing an eye on its brow. Two open roses with leaves sit either side of the head, and a faint burst of rays appears above it. The work uses bold outlines with fine hatching in the horns and fur, with no colour or shading.

Neo-trad Ram Goat Horn Eye Triangle Rose Flower Ray Beard

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ram came down off the fortune booth on the Tuesday before Hull, and Mrs Pell wanted him scraped back to bare board before the lorries left. I was nineteen and got the scraper because I was the only one who didn't mind the smell of turpentine. She stood at the foot of the ladder with her tea going cold in a tin mug and said the eye on his brow had cost the family more than any rigged coconut shy, and that a council man had asked questions about it in Doncaster.

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I didn't argue. I had painted that eye myself the summer I joined, following her chalk lines, the triangle sharp as a cut and the iris the colour of wet slate. The roses either side were my idea too, two open blooms with their leaves turned up, because the old gilt on the booth had looked like a funeral wreath. She had let me keep them.

I worked until the light went, the scraper biting through the cream paint in long curls. Under the varnish the horns came up again, every ridge hatched in fine black lines I'd forgotten I had drawn, then the roses, and last of all the eye, which would not come off however hard I leaned. Mrs Pell came back with a paraffin lamp and looked at the triangle for a long time, then at me.

Leave it, she said. Nobody pays sixpence to look at a bare board.

We hung him back over the booth in Hull that Friday, facing the road. Some nights, when the generator stopped and the rides ticked down, I'd swear the eye had turned to watch the cash tin.