Pencil drawing of a pair of antlers with crossed arrows, a small sprig of flowers and the words a wounded deer leaps the highest, shown as a tattoo design with no body placement.

Antlers, arrows and flowers with a quote

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A pencil sketch of two deer antlers facing each other, with shaded tines and a small cluster of flowers at the base. Two arrows cross beneath the flowers, and the words a wounded deer leaps the highest are written in a handwritten script within the antlers. The drawing is in greyscale on a plain white background, with soft shading on the antlers and arrow fletchings.

Botanical Antler Deer Arrow Flower Quote Script

Find an artist for this

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

The stag had been hit low, behind the shoulder, and Walter Dunn knew it before he reached the bracken. Blood came dark and steady across the frost, and the tracks went uphill, which was wrong. A wounded beast should run for water. This one climbed toward the crags above Glen Esk as if it had an appointment.

Keep reading

His daughter Morag had come up with him against her mother's wishes, carrying the spare bow and a flask of cold tea. She was fourteen and had not yet learned to keep her mouth shut on a hill. 'It's jumping,' she said, pointing at a boulder. Sure enough, the deer had cleared the gully in one bound, antlers held high, and the next print was higher still.

They followed it through the night, the flask passed back and forth, the arrows rattling in Walter's quiver like loose teeth. Near dawn they found the animal lying on a shelf of granite, not dead, its head lifted as though listening for them. Walter did not raise the bow. He sat down beside it and let the cold settle into his knees. Morag asked why. 'Because it has earned a choice,' he said, and she did not argue.

They left it there with the sun coming up over the Mounth. When they came back that afternoon the shelf was empty, and a single broken arrow lay across the stone, its grey fletching pointing at the sky. Morag kept it on the windowsill for forty years and never once told her children where it had come from.