Bull tattoo ideas, meaning and designs

Four bulls, and which one you mean

Tell the artist which of these you want before anything else, because they are drawn by different people in different styles and the sizes are nowhere near each other.

The Taurus overlap, and when to get the glyph instead

A large share of people searching for a bull tattoo were born between roughly 20 April and 20 May and want their sign. If that is you, there are three separate designs and they are not interchangeable. The glyph is a circle with a crescent above it and works at 3 cm on a wrist. The constellation is a different drawing, a V of stars with Aldebaran as the bright orange one at the bull's eye and the Pleiades cluster nearby. The animal is the third option and needs twenty times the space.

Our Taurus page covers the dates, the glyph and the star positions in detail, so read that if the sign is the point rather than the animal. Mixing all three into one tattoo is a common mistake. A bull's head with a glyph on its forehead and a constellation behind it is three ideas competing inside one piece.

Horns, hump and the way a bull reads

The fighting bull has a pronounced muscle over the neck and shoulders, the morrillo, and that mass is what makes the animal look dangerous. Leave it out and you have drawn a cow. The dewlap, the loose skin hanging from the throat, does similar work on a Brahman or a longhorn.

Details that separate a bull from a cow

• A heavy raised muscle over the neck and shoulders, highest just behind the head
• Horns growing wide out of the skull, with growth rings near the base and smooth tips
• A deliberately uneven pair of horns, since matched horns read as a logo
• A broad square muzzle with large nostrils, and no nose ring unless you want a show animal
• Short coarse hair drawn as direction instead of individual strands, especially the whorl on the forehead

Skulls, placement and aging

A bull skull is the most durable design on this page. It is a strong silhouette with large areas of solid black or clean negative space, no fur texture, and the horn spread gives it a horizontal shape that fits across the chest, the top of the back and the front of the shoulder. Flowers growing through the eye sockets is a common addition and works, as long as the flowers stay large.

Full colour bulls are rare for good reason, since the animal is mostly black or dark brown and black ink does that better than pigment. If you want the Spanish version, ask for black and grey with the bright points left as bare skin. Over twenty years that holds almost perfectly, where a realism piece built on light grey wash loses its contrast and wants a touch up around year ten.