Black and grey pencil drawing of stag antlers above a cluster of three roses, presented as a tattoo design.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Antlers and three roses design

Realism · Black and grey · Flash

The drawing shows a pair of large stag antlers with three roses stacked beneath them, forming a central cluster. The roses have soft, layered petals and the antlers are rendered with fine hatching and textured shading. The image is entirely black and grey on a plain white background, with no body placement shown.

Realism Botanical Antler Stag Deer Rose Flower

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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

Sit closer, the lot of you, and leave the kettle alone, it's older than your mothers. This is the tale of the stag on Scarth Hill, the one that carried its garden on its head, and I'll tell it once, so mind the bit where the dog comes in.

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Nobody remembers the year the gardens died, only that the Reach turned to glass and salt and the green things were kept in sealed vaults beneath the old quarry. Bram Oddie kept a twist of seed in his coat pocket, because his wife had asked for roses at their wedding and there were none left within a day's walk. He climbed Scarth at dawn with his dog and a rusted spade, and came down at dusk with nothing, because the stag was standing in the bracken with three roses blooming from its antlers, heavy with dew, and it looked at him the way a magistrate looks at a debtor.

Bram went home and said nothing. Every morning after that he left a tin cup of water by the gate of the hill field, and every morning the cup was empty and the roses had opened a little wider. His wife, Ilse, found the spade in the byre with fresh dirt on the blade and asked where he had been digging. He told her he had been learning patience. Then the trader from the coast came through with his brass scales, saw the stag grazing the fence with its roses gold in the lamplight, and offered enough silver to buy a roof and a tree.

So they went up together, Bram with the rifle and Ilse with the knife, and the stag lifted its head and let them come close. The roses were loosening as they watched, petal by petal, drifting into the heather until the antlers stood bare. Ilse knelt and gathered the petals in her apron, and by the next spring there were roses on every wall in the Reach, grown from the stag's own petals, and not one of them has ever been cut for silver since. Mind your cups on the way home.