Using head to get the first lines of a stream, and tail to get the last lines in a stream is intuitive.
But if you need to skip the first few lines of a stream, then you use tail “-n +k” syntax. And to skip the last lines of a stream head “-n -k” syntax.
Here is an example of using tail to skip to the 3rd line:
$ for i in $(seq 1 5); do echo $i; done | tail -n +3 3 4 5
And here is an example of using head to skip the last 2 lines:
$ for i in $(seq 1 5); do echo $i; done | head -n -2 1 2 3