Traditional colour tattoo of an antlered animal head with red roses and a yellow Montana banner on an upper arm.

Antlered animal head and roses on upper arm

Traditional · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A black animal head with antlers and a pink-lined ear sits above red roses with green leaves. A yellow banner lettered MONTANA runs across the bottom of the design. Bold black outlines and flat areas of colour define the piece against bare skin.

Traditional Upper arm Animal Antler Rose Banner Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The Billings freight ran four hours late, and by the time it groaned into Sawtooth Siding, Ada Lindqvist had signed for three crates of barbed wire and a sack of mail gone soft with rain. The fourth crate was narrow and nailed shut. Its waybill said MONTANA in black block capitals, and beneath that, in a hand that pressed hard enough to tear the paper, Deliver to the Rose Widow. Nobody on the line knew a Rose Widow.

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She didn't trust the porter with it, so she dragged it onto the platform herself, one hook through the slats and her boots braced against the wind. The prairie smelled of wet iron and sage. She pried the lid with a claw hammer and camphor came up sharp. Packed in sawdust and yellowed newspaper lay a stuffed jackrabbit, black as coal tar, with a set of antlers screwed into its skull. One glass eye had been painted the blue of a cold lake. Someone had lined its ear with pink silk, neat as a seamstress's hem, so that it looked like it was listening for a whistle that had not yet sounded.

The Rose Widow lived at the end of the siding in a house with a red-painted fence. The roses along it were black hips and dead heads, which made no sense for March. Ada knocked, and the door opened before her knuckles had left the wood. The woman inside was old and very straight, and she looked past Ada at the crate as though it had been owed to her for thirty years. "You're late," she said. "Thomas always came in on the Thursday freight. He went out after one of those in '88 with a Winchester and a bottle of rose oil, and he never came back for his supper."

Ada looked down. The sawdust had gone damp, and the glass eye had turned toward the fence, where two roses had just opened in the frost.