Bull Tattoo Ideas, Designs and Meaning

What a bull tattoo means

Strength is the reading everyone expects, and the animal earns it. A grown bull can weigh a tonne, and its power is the forward kind: it drops its head and comes straight on. Worn for that, a bull is less about aggression than about not being moved, a picture of someone who held a position under pressure. Stubbornness is the same quality seen from the other side, and most wearers accept both.

Fertility is the older meaning and was once the main one. Across the ancient Mediterranean and the Near East the bull stood for the force that keeps herds and fields going: Egypt kept a living sacred bull, Apis, at Memphis, and bulls were among the grandest sacrifices a Greek city could make. Finance supplied the modern version, the bull market, and Arturo Di Modica's bronze Charging Bull, left without permission in Lower Manhattan in December 1989, made the animal the emblem of an entire industry.

The bullfight is the part to decide on deliberately. In Spain, Portugal, southern France and parts of Latin America the corrida is heritage to some and cruelty to many others; Catalonia banned it in 2010, and Spain's Constitutional Court struck the ban down in 2016. Banderillas in the neck, a cape or a matador put a tattoo on one side of that argument, whatever the wearer intends. The trash-polka head here, crossed by a red slash, sits close to that argument without quite joining it.

A skull says something else again. Stripped to bone and horn, the head becomes the American West, drought and endurance, the cow skulls Georgia O'Keeffe gathered in the New Mexico desert and painted from 1931. Classical architecture hung the same skull with garlands, the bucranium, in memory of sacrifice. It also holds small better than a living head, having no hair to shade.

Where the design comes from

The Hall of the Bulls at Lascaux, found in 1940, holds aurochs painted some seventeen thousand years ago, and the aurochs, the wild ox behind all cattle, died out in 1627 in Poland's Jaktorów forest. On Crete the bull became a performance. The bull-leaping fresco from the palace at Knossos, excavated by Arthur Evans after 1900 and heavily restored, shows an athlete somersaulting over a charging bull, and the terracotta bull under the stars here borrows its pose. In 1945 and 1946 Picasso took one bull lithograph through eleven states, paring it to a handful of lines, and every one-line bull since works the same problem.

Choosing yours

• Check the horns first. A bull's sweep out and forward from the top of the skull; a ram's curl down beside the jaw, and one head on this page is a ram. A frontal bull is therefore wide and needs a broad field, while one in profile, like the Knossos animal, runs long and suits a narrow field such as a forearm or calf.
• Decide, too, between the animal and the sign. Eight bulls here were drawn for Taurus, some with Aldebaran as the eye, and that reading belongs to the Taurus page; the single-line and minimalist heads hold smallest.

Common questions