Neo-traditional tattoo of a bearded figure wearing antlers and a helmet, framed by a black foliage wreath, on a calf.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Antlered bearded figure on a calf

Neo-trad · Calf · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows a bearded figure with antlers and a helmet-like headpiece, set against a pale blue oval and framed by a black leafy wreath with a small horseshoe-like motif at the base. The face and beard are shaded in greys with smooth tonal gradients, while the outlines are bold and black. The design is centred on the calf and fills the frame, with a blurred outdoor background behind the leg.

Neo-trad Calf Antler Helmet Wreath Foliage Horseshoe

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the step, it's slippy where the tide leaves its weed, and don't be lighting that lamp near the rope locker. Now. You want the one about the Horned Man of Wick Lode, or the one about my uncle's false teeth? Wick Lode first, because it's the one that's true enough to hurt.

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There was a keeper of the sluice gates, back when the drains still ran wild, a great bearded fellow with an iron pot on his head, and from the pot grew antlers that had been a stag's before the Fen took him. Nobody agreed on whether he was a man who'd been cursed or a curse that had learned to walk. He kept the water down. Every March he'd wade out to the stakes with a horseshoe in his coat, and he'd nail it to the first post the flood had cracked, and that was how the lode held another year.

One spring the Widow Prentice's boy went under the gate in a punt, and the old keeper went in after him, and they found them both come morning, tangled in the reed roots like two bits of driftwood that had decided to be friends. The boy had a horseshoe in his fist. Nobody could say where he'd got it. The keeper's beard was full of silt and the antlers were snapped at the tines.

That's why the wreath of leaves goes round him in the painted board at the Ferry Inn, and why there's always a horseshoe nailed to the sill of any boat that comes through Wick. Drink up. The tide's turned, and so should you.