Black and grey antler tattoo on the forearm near the wrist, with a brown and white dog resting its head beside the arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Antler tattoo on a forearm

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a black and grey antler or moose antler tattoo on the forearm near the wrist. The antler is drawn with clean outlines and soft grey shading along its tines and base. A brown and white dog with a dark nose rests its head beside the arm, filling the right side of the frame.

Forearm Antler Dog

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The stag was already in the shallows when Nell cast off the bow rope, its antlers standing out of the mist like a bare hedge grown in the wrong place. Her father had told her never to moor below the lock at Hatherell after the thaw, and she had never once listened, so the barge had brought her here with the coal and the grey light and the old lurcher, Tess, standing on the gunwale and watching the animal the way she watched rats.

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The stag did not bolt when the engine coughed. It lifted its head and looked at her across the water with a patience she recognised from the lock keeper, who had waited thirty years for his wife to come home from Leeds. Nell fetched the antler from the cabin shelf, where it had sat since October, pale at the tips and grey where the damp had got into the grain. She had found it in the reeds below the willows and carried it home under her coat, not knowing why.

She held it out over the rail. The stag stepped forward until the water ran over its knees, then stopped, as if measuring the gap between them. Tess sneezed. Nell thought about the cold lock and the long pull upstream, and about how a thing shed in winter still belongs to the animal that wore it, however far it has been carried. The stag turned its head, and its remaining antler caught the first sun through the mist.

She did not throw it. She set it on the roof of the cabin, beside the chimney pipe, and went below to start the engine. When she came back up with the tiller in her hand, the water was empty and the reeds were moving, and the antler had gone too, though she never saw it fall.