Black and grey script quote tattoo framed by two antler shapes on the upper back near the shoulder blade.

Antler and script quote on upper back

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a black and grey tattoo on the upper back, showing two antler or bone shapes framing a handwritten quote in italic script. The antlers have shaded edges and highlights, while the lettering is in clean, dark linework. The skin is pale and the framing is tight, with the tattoo filling most of the image.

Lettering Realism Back Antler Bone Script Quote

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, for the fire wants feeding and I'll not talk over the wind. In the hard winter the Mallory beck froze to its bed, Hannah Crewe took a lantern and a sack of salt up to the top field, because the ewes were dying under the drifts and nobody else would go.

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At the far wall she found a stag standing in the snow, antlers spread like two dead oaks, grey as ash in the lamplight. He regarded her a long while. 'I will clear your flock,' he said, 'if you will give me what the snow takes first.' She agreed, the way a tired woman agrees to anything. By morning every ewe was up and bleating, the stag was gone, and where he had stood lay a single bone the length of her arm, pale as milk.

Each winter after, the stag came back to that wall and asked the same question. Each winter she gave him a little more: her maiden name, her mother's lullaby, the colour of her wedding ribbon. He turned these things over with his great head and said, 'Am I more than you bargained for yet?' And she always answered, 'Not yet,' because she was stubborn and he was still useful.

The year her grandson was born she went up without the lantern. The snow was up to her knees. She stood at the wall and said, 'Yes. You are more than I bargained for. Take the rest of me, but leave the boy his winters.' The stag bowed low and walked into the dark, and to this day that top field is green in February. Nobody on this farm has ever asked why the old bones hang above the kitchen door.