Black and grey dotwork tattoo of animal skulls with antlers and leaves on the outer thigh, in a botanical style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Animal skulls and leaves on a thigh

Dotwork · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A large tattoo on the outer thigh shows an antlered deer skull and a horned animal skull, framed by layered leaves and a central flower. The skulls and leaves are built from fine linework and stippled dotwork shading, giving soft grey tones. The design is entirely black and grey and fills the thigh from the hip down to the knee area, with the legs and dark shorts visible at the left of the frame.

Dotwork Botanical Thigh Skull Antler Leaves Flower Animal skull

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the pair of you, and mind the windfalls, because the wasps are drunk on them this week and they will have your ankles. Gran Ilse kept bees and a wasp's temper, and she always said the orchard at Hollin Bank had buried three deer and a ram before the first apple went in the ground. Nobody dug them up. You don't dig up what the land has agreed to keep.

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The deer was a stag called Rook, who came down every August to eat the early Discovery drops under the Bramley. The old farmer, Tobias Ashdown, shot him once in the year of the wet harvest, not out of spite but because the fruit was going to rot anyway, and he couldn't bear the thought of the animal going to waste. He took the antlers to hang in the barn and he laid the skull under the flowering quince. The ram came after, a tup from the high pasture that wandered into the orchard when the gate was left swinging. Nobody remembers who lost him. His skull sat beside the stag's, and the leaves came down over both of them every October, layer on layer, until the bones were wearing a crown of rust and gold.

Here is the part the children like. On the last night of the picking, when the moon is thin as a paring knife, you can walk the rows and hear the skulls talking in the dry voice of old wood. They don't ask for much. They want the windfalls left for the wasps, and a single flower from the wild chicory tucked into the bark. Ashdown's daughter did it for forty years and never once got stung.

Well. She got stung once, the spring she forgot. The apples that year came up small and sour, and the family lost the lower field to the bank. So you see, you pay the orchard its due. Now eat your bread and pass the cup, and mind the wasps.