Black and grey ink drawing of a ram skull with large curled horns, rendered in fine hatching on a plain light background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ram skull with curled horns

Realism · Black and grey · Flash

A front-facing ram skull with two large, curled horns, drawn as a standalone illustration. The bone is built up with fine cross-hatching and stippled shading, giving the skull and horn ridges a rounded, three-dimensional look. The image is in black ink on a pale grey background, with the skull centred and the horns spreading out to either side.

Realism Ram Skull Horn Animal skull

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The tup's skull came down off the byre wall the spring my father died, and my mother would not have it in the house. She said it had watched too many lambings to be trusted near the kitchen, so Tom carried it up to the top fold in a feed sack and wedged it between two stones where the wind couldn't get at it. The horns were the thing everyone remarked on. They curled twice round like the rings of a felled ash, grooved and dark with age, and old Hob Teasdale who had bred the Swaledale flock on Crag Top swore that ram had gone over the scree after a ewe in the snow of 1947 and come back with ice in its horns and a limp it never lost.

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Tom laughed at that until the February the snow closed the pass. The sheep came down on their own, the way they do when the weather turns, and every one of them was counted at the gate except a gimmer called Dorrit. He went up at dusk with a lantern and a dog that wouldn't follow past the wall. He did not come down that night, and nor did the dog.

My mother sat up with the range going cold and I sat with her, listening to the wind try the byre door. Near four she stood, took the old tin of wax matches from the dresser, and said we would fetch them both before the light. We found Tom asleep against the top wall with the lantern out and Dorrit pressed against his legs, and the skull was back on its nail above the byre door, facing the fell, its horns full of snow.