Black and grey antlers tattoo on the back of a neck, with dotwork shading at the base.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Antlers on the back of the neck

Dotwork · Neck · Black and grey · Photo

A pair of antlers is tattooed centred on the back of the neck, curving outwards and up from a shaded base. The antlers are drawn with dark outlines and fine internal detail. The base below them is built from stippled dots that fade downwards, and the image is entirely in black ink and grey tones.

Dotwork Fine line Neck Antler Deer

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The stag came up through the bin store behind Ashcroft House the winter the lifts broke, and nobody on the estate could agree where it had been before that. Mrs Pell on the ninth floor said it had walked out of the canal, shaking the water from its antlers like a wet dog. The man from the council said it was a fallow buck that had got out of the park two miles off. Both of them were right, which is how Ashcroft liked things.

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It climbed the stairwells at night, one flight at a time, and wherever its hooves touched the concrete a fine grey frost came up in speckles that never quite melted. By morning the children had followed the trail down to the bottom step, counting the dots as if they were stitches. Dev from number forty, who fixed the lifts when they worked, would not go near the shaft. He said the thing had looked at him the way a landlord looks at arrears.

Tilly Marsh, eleven and stubborn, asked her gran what it wanted. Her gran said it wanted what everyone wanted in January, which was for someone to leave a light on and not ask it to explain itself. So Tilly propped the fire door open on the roof with a brick and set a torch on the parapet, pointing at the sky. In the small hours the stag came out into the wind, and the antlers caught the beam and threw it back across the car park in a spread of bright threads.

He did not stay. He stood at the edge of the roof while the sky went from black to the colour of old dishwater, then walked down the fire escape and out over the ring road, the frost falling from his legs and dissolving on the tarmac behind him. Tilly turned off the torch. On the parapet, where he had stood, a small grey scatter of dots was still there in the morning light, and nobody on Ashcroft ever swept it away.