Black ink drawing of a ram skull with curled horns, stippled and hatched, with an eye and radiating rays above it, on a cream background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ram skull with eye and rays

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

A ram skull is shown front on, with its curled horns filled with fine wavy hatching and the bone areas textured with stippled dots. A single eye sits above the skull's brow, surrounded by a fan of thin radiating lines. The drawing is in black ink on a plain cream background, centred and symmetrical.

Dotwork Ram Skull Horn Eye Ray

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

I was sent up the Scarrow pass with a sack of tallow and one instruction from the Reeve: bring back the ram's skull that hung over the chapel door at Tarn Hollow, because the bells had stopped and nobody in the valley would say why.

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Old Hespa, who had kept the flocks since before the kingdom had a name, did not look up from her carding when I asked. She only said to take the skull without touching its brow, and to count the rings on its horns on the way down, one for every winter the ram had lived. The horns grew in coils like the lip of a shell. The eye above them, she said, had shut the night the last shepherd's dog went missing, and the valley had been quiet ever since, the way a room is quiet after someone has stopped talking mid-sentence.

The skull lay under a cairn on the high shelf, bleached to the colour of old milk. When I lifted it, pale lines fanned out from the brow as though the sun had come up behind the bone, and the dark eye in the centre opened. It did not look at me. It looked past my shoulder, down the long fold of the hills to the sleeping town, and I understood that it had been counting too.

I carried the skull down in a wool sack. Somewhere past the second ring I lost count and started again, and by the time I reached the chapel the lanterns were lit and every bell in the valley was ringing at once. I hung the skull back above the door myself. Hespa came up the path behind me, looked at the horns for a long moment, and said the rings had gone round one more time than they should have.