Black and grey antler tattoos on both inner forearms of a man in a navy shirt, shown with arms extended towards the camera.

Antler tattoos on both forearms

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Two matching antler designs sit on the forearms, each curving from the wrist towards the elbow with branching tines. The outlines are bold and dark, with soft grey shading along the inner edges that gives the antlers some depth. The plain navy shirt and pale skin keep the focus on the symmetrical pair of tattoos.

Forearm Antler Deer Pair

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain had been coming sideways across the market since seven, and I had already packed away the tea urn twice. I sat under the tarpaulin of my stall sorting shed antlers into piles by weight, because the buyers always asked for matched pairs and I hated selling a left without its right.

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A young carver came by with his collar up, turning over a six-pointer with a thumb that knew the grain. He wanted two antlers from the same stag, shed on the same February morning, with tines of the same colour. I told him no such thing existed, not really. A stag's left side is never quite its right, and two animals never grow the same. He laughed and said that was exactly why he wanted them, so he could read one against the other, like a pair of hands held out for a coat.

I went through the crate from the back of the van, where Angus had wrapped the Glen Tarff finds in newspaper. I found two that had dropped within a few yards of each other, and I would have sworn to it from the wear on the bases. I wrapped them in a feed sack and handed them over with a slip of paper saying where the hill was.

He paid in coins gone green with damp and was gone into the rain. A month later he came back under my tarpaulin and showed me a photograph on his phone, the screen beaded with wet from his pocket. The two shapes curved the same way, one rising and the other answering it, and the shading in the grooves looked like water still running off them. "Matched," he said. I looked at the picture, then at the rain, and I could not tell which of the two was the copy.