Black and grey realism style tattoo of a deer antler curving down the upper arm, with shaded highlights along the tines and base.

Antler tattoo on an upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A tattoo of a deer antler wraps from the shoulder down the outer upper arm, with the tines branching near the top and the stem tapering towards the elbow. The linework is dark and fairly bold, with soft grey shading that gives the antler a rounded, three-dimensional look. The photo is a close, slightly warm-toned snapshot of a person's arm, with their face not shown and the tattoo filling most of the frame.

Realism Upper arm Antler Deer Animal Shading

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The stag had been shed in the bracken above Glenrothie the week before the first frost, and Morag Dunne found it while she was looking for the lost ewe. She carried it home under one arm like a bundle of kindling, its beam cold and light, the tines still sharp at their tips. Her brother Alasdair said it was worth nothing to a man with no lamp to hang it from, but she set it on the windowsill above the range anyway and told him a thing shed its crown in the wood was owed a place by a fire.

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The old woman who kept the bothy at the top of the glen came down that November, wrapped to the eyes, and asked to see it. She turned the antler over in her hands for a long while, running a thumb along the knobbled base where the skull had been. Then she said the stag would come looking for it when the snow was deep enough to hide the track, and that whoever kept it would have to walk it back to the corrie before the thaw or pay for the keeping in years.

Morag laughed at her. She laughed again three nights later, when a heavy step crossed the yard and stopped at the byre door, and a breath like a bellows steamed against the glass. In the morning the antler was gone from the sill and a single grey hair lay on the flagstone where it had stood. She took the path up through the drifts with her boots soaked to the ankle, and at the head of the corrie she set the bone down on a flat stone, and the snow began to fall more softly around her, as if it were being asked to keep quiet.