Small black fine line tattoo of an antler on the upper arm, set against a red plaid fabric background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Antler outline on upper arm

Fine line · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a single antler drawn in black outline with a few inner lines suggesting its form. The linework is thin and even, with minimal shading, and the ink is black on pale skin. The antler is placed diagonally across the arm, with the red and black plaid fabric filling the left side of the frame.

Fine line Upper arm Antler Deer Outline

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The last of the Pellew Travelling Show came into Shallow Wick in the wet week after Michaelmas, with one lion gone grey at the muzzle, two ponies that no longer agreed on anything, and a stag kept in the back paddock for the old trick of the vanishing man. The stag had one antler. The other had snapped off on a gatepost the spring before, and nobody in the show could say whose fault it had been, which was the way of things with the Pellews.

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Tam Greave looked after the animals, and he was the one who went out to the paddock each dusk with a bucket of crusts. The stag came to the rail for him and for no one else. Tam talked to it the way he talked to the lion, low and without much hope, about the price of diesel and the weather over the hill and how the big top had let in water at the seams again. The stag listened with its head on one side, the single tine catching what light was left.

When the ringmaster, Mr Vane, began counting the takings on the caravan step and said the stag would fetch forty pounds from a man in Thrapston, Tam said nothing at all. That night he sat up with the stag in the paddock and heard the old story his grandmother had told him, the one about a stag that gives up a horn to whoever sits with it until the frost comes. Nobody in the Pellew show had ever believed it. Tam did not believe it either, but he sat there until the frost came, and in the grey morning the broken antler was lying in the wet grass at his boots, pale as bone and smooth as a river stone.

He carried it to the lorry and laid it on the step beside Mr Vane's cash box. The stag walked off into the wood with its one horn held high, and the show went out of Shallow Wick without it, and Tam went with the show, carrying the other horn wrapped in a feed sack all the way to the coast.