Black and grey fine line tattoo of antlers with a small flower and dotted chain on the back of a neck.

Antlers and flower on the back of the neck

Fine line · Neck · Black and grey · Photo

A small tattoo of a pair of antlers curves around a central flower, with dotted lines hanging beneath it. The linework is fine and delicate, with light shading along the antler branches. The black and white photograph shows the back of a person's neck, with their hair pulled to one side.

Fine line Botanical Neck Antler Deer Flower Dotted chain

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Now you sit close, because the fire is low and the old tale only likes an audience that leans in. Up past the last cottage at Hollin Edge there was a forest that the villagers called the Hushwood, and in it lived a hart whose antlers had grown so wide they caught the low sun like the arms of a candelabra. Every autumn it came down to the stream at the edge of the trees to drink, and every autumn a girl named Ysolde Penhallow waited on the far bank with a basket of bramble jam and a stubborn heart.

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She had lost her brother to the bog two winters back, and she had decided the hart must be her brother's keeper, or at least its messenger. So she tied a string of rowan beads to a stick and dangled them over the water, the way her mother used to sway a ribbon for a cat. The hart did not come closer. It only lowered its head, looked at the beads, and then, very deliberately, bent to nose a single white blossom off the bank and lay it on the water between them.

Ysolde never did learn what it meant, though she tried for forty years. But when she died at last, the people of Hollin Edge found a small pressed flower in her Bible, wrapped in a strand of rowan beads, and the ash of it had worked into the paper so it looked like a crown. My grandmother swore the hart still walks that far bank on the first frost, and that if you see it, you should bow, not because it is holy, but because it has been waiting a long time for someone to pay attention.