Black blackwork tattoo of a pair of antlers, placed centrally on the back of a person's neck with hair pulled to either side.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Antler pair on the back of the neck

Blackwork · Neck · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of the back of a person's neck, with dark hair pulled to either side. Two separate antler shapes sit centrally below the hairline, drawn in solid black strokes with tapered tips and small branching tines. The image is black and grey, with soft natural light on the skin and a plain background.

Blackwork Neck Antler Deer

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bell in Harrowmere had not rung since the frost, and the miller's daughter swore that was why the antlers on the Long Gate had started to creak. The reeve sent you up the hill with a lamp and a coil of tallow rope, because the gate was his business and the antlers belonged to nobody.

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They had once been the crown of Stag-King Osric of the Vale of Eddow, until his two sons quarrelled over the river meadows and took hatchets to him in the winter the Eddow froze solid. Nobody in the kingdom could agree which son had struck the second blow, so the crown was split in two and nailed up on the gate, each half angled away from the other, as if they had spent their lives trying to look elsewhere.

The nails were rust-black and the wood beneath them had gone grey as a heron's back. You stood on the bottom bar with the lamp hooked on your wrist and reached for the nearer tine. It was warm, which made no sense in that wind, and when your fingers closed over it, the far half shifted on its nail and leaned in, the way a sleeper turns towards a voice.

You threaded the rope through the wood where the two tips almost met, knotted it twice, and climbed down. Below, the reeve was shouting about the cost of hemp. Behind him the village had come out with its lanterns, and none of them moved to stop you. Overhead the antlers settled with a long, dry sigh, and the bell in the tower rang once, low, as if someone had finally remembered the words.