Colour tattoo of the state of Texas on an upper back, filled with blue, red and white and overlaid with a shaded longhorn steer skull.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Texas outline with longhorn skull on upper back

Realism · Back · Mixed · Photo

A large outline of the state of Texas fills the upper back, with a shaded longhorn steer skull across its centre. The skull is rendered in tan and brown tones with soft highlights, while the state is filled with blue, red and white patches. Bold black outlines frame the state shape against the lightly freckled skin.

Realism Back Texas State outline Skull

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The fence post at the bottom of Dad's garden had been leaning since the drought of fifty-six, and that April I finally set about straightening it. Mrs Obregón next door had warned me about the ground. Caliche, she said, the white rock under the topsoil, will beat a spade back to its handle. She was right. By noon I had a hole the depth of my forearm and a blister I'd not bothered to hide.

Keep reading

Under the clay my spade struck bone. Not rock, bone: a steer's skull, horns spreading wide as a pair of cartwheels, the bone gone the colour of weak tea. Someone had buried it facing the house. I sat back on my heels and laughed at myself, because it was exactly the sort of thing Granddad would have called a sign. Then I stopped laughing, because the horns looked less like a sign and more like something that had been waiting a long time for someone to dig.

I carried it up to the porch in the wheelbarrow and set it on the swing. Mrs Obregón came round with a jug of lemonade and looked at it for a long while. 'That's Ruth's steer,' she said. 'Her husband ran longhorns out past Mason before the water went. He buried the old bull the year the creek dried up, facing home so it would know the way.' I asked how she knew. She poured two glasses. 'Because I helped him dig.'

We never did straighten the post. I left it leaning, and every spring since I have planted bluebonnets along the fence where the ground turns from clay to caliche. The skull watches over the bed from the porch, horns wide, facing the way it was meant to.