Black ink tribal design of a bull's head with long horns, drawn inside a circle on white paper, shown as a design rather than a tattoo on skin.

Tribal bull head inside a circle

Blackwork · Black and grey · Flash

A tribal-style bull's head in profile, with long curved horns that extend beyond a circular outline. The design uses bold black linework and solid black tribal shapes against the pale paper, with flowing swirls on the face and mane. It is a flat ink drawing with no shading or colour, centred on the page.

Blackwork Bull Horn Tribal Circle Animal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bull swam the last hundred yards of the channel on the ebb, horns held up out of the water like a pair of oars, and by the time you reached the shingle he had already decided the island was his. Nobody else would go down to him. The boatman said he'd seen a bull take a man's arm off at Ross market, so you went alone, with a halter knotted from old lamp-cord and a bucket of meal, and you talked to him the way your father talked to the lens when it stuck: low and patient, as if it might be listening.

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Through that first winter the bull walked the rim of the island every night, a slow circle on the cliff path, and you climbed the tower to trim the wick and watched him from above. Round and round he went, black against the grey grass, his head always turned towards the light. The council on the mainland wanted him back and sent a letter. Your father, who had the good pen, wrote that the island had no fence and no one to build one, and that the bull seemed to know the path better than any of them.

In March the fog came down thick for three days and the supply boat did not come. On the fourth night the bull stopped at the cliff edge and lifted his head, and you understood what he was doing before you saw the small lamp far out, drifting and lost. You climbed to the gallery and swung the great lens by hand, slow, the beam sweeping. Below, the bull turned his horns to follow each pass, the way a needle follows north, until the boat's bow came nosing out of the murk and turned away from the rocks.

Your father never mentioned the bull again. But every evening after that you found him at the cliff's edge, facing the tower, waiting for the light to come round to him.