Close-up of a grey fine line antler tattoo with small flowers at its base on a person's forearm, beside a long necklace with a crystal pendant.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Antler and flower tattoo on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a curved pair of antlers with small flower clusters at the base, drawn in fine black linework with light grey shading. It sits on the inner forearm near the elbow, and the ink appears soft and slightly faded. The composition is a close crop of the arm against a plain white top, with a long silver necklace and crystal pendant hanging to the right.

Fine line Botanical Forearm Antler Flower Necklace Pendant

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The antlers turn up in the hedge row below Marrowdyke on the third morning of the thaw, tangled in bramble, pale as bone and still crusted with frost. You kick through the snow to reach them, your breath going up in short white bursts, and your father's voice comes across the yard calling you back to the ewes. You don't go back. You kneel and work the twig loose, and a snowdrop breaks off in your glove, the first you've seen this year, its head bent under the cold.

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Your father says a stag that size is a hard old beast, one that has walked the far side of the beck for twenty winters. He says nothing about where its antlers went once it shed them. You carry them home under your coat, the tines pricking your ribs, and set them on the windowsill above the range where the kettle steams the room. By February the tips have softened, and a bud of green has pushed up through the cracks at the base, and your mother, who never liked what the land gave without being asked, says it is bad luck to bring the dead indoors.

You don't argue. You take the pen from the dresser drawer and draw around the shape on the back of the feed invoice, then add the snowdrops, three of them, drooping at the root where the antler meets the grey. It is not a good drawing. The lines wander. But when you hold it up to the window the light comes through the paper and the flowers look as though they are growing out of the bone.

Your father finds it on the kitchen table the next morning. He doesn't say anything. He picks up the sheet, folds it once, and tucks it into the pocket of his waxed jacket, and in March, when the lambing starts and the ground softens, you see the shape of it pressed against his chest each time he bends over a ewe.