Black linework tattoo of a stylised bull head with crescent horns and scroll details on the top of a foot.

Scrolled bull head on the top of a foot

Other · Black and grey · Photo

A stylised bull head sits on the top of a bare foot, drawn in black ink with crescent horns, scroll-shaped ears and a curling central motif. The outline is smooth and even, with decorative swirls along the sides and muzzle. The tattoo is set against pale skin and a blue glossy surface, with no shading or colour apart from the black ink.

Other Bull Horn Scroll Swirl

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The snow had shut Hollin Pass for three days, and the Crescent Bull was full to the rafters with carters, a travelling surveyor and a widow who would not say where she was headed. You were the one who carried coal up from the cellar, because the landlady's knees had given up on stairs and her son had gone over the top with the last cart before the drifts closed. Each time you came back down the steps, your breath smoked in the dark passage and the fire in the taproom threw its gold across the flagstones like something spilled.

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The sign above the door was older than the roof beams: a bull's head cut from black oak, its horns sweeping up into points like a new moon, its ears unrolled into scrolls the weather had worn glossy. Nobody knew who had carved it. The landlady's grandmother had told her the bull was a ferryman of sorts, that any traveller caught in white water could ask it for passage if they left a copper on the step and said the right name. Nobody ever agreed on what the right name was. You thought it was nonsense, the sort of talk people make when the snow is high and the lamps are low.

On the third night someone knocked, though the lane had been empty since noon. You opened the door a crack. A man stood in the drift with a lantern that burned blue, asking for a bed and no questions. You told him the house was full, and you were already shutting the door when you saw a coin glinting on the step, set out in a neat row beside the boot-scraper.

In the morning the coin was gone, the drifts had softened to slush, and the surveyor was snoring on the settle. Only the sign had changed. Its left horn had curled a little further round, and beneath it, on the damp stone, lay a single black curl of wood shaving, still faintly warm.