Black and grey fine line tattoo of antlers framing two roses and a small flower with outlined triangles, placed on the inner forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Antlers, roses and triangles on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a pair of stag antlers curving outward, with two roses and a smaller open flower clustered at their base. Above them sit overlapping outlined triangles, one partly shaded, along with a faint dotted triangle outline. The linework is fine and the petals use stippled shading in black and grey ink on pale skin, with the composition centred on the forearm.

Fine line Geometric Botanical Forearm Antler Rose Flower Triangle Geometric shape Stag

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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

You are the only one still awake at Hollin Cross when the 23:40 slides in with its lamps dimmed, because the driver has been told to stop short of the platform. Nobody gets off. The doors stay shut, so you walk the length of the train with your torch, counting windows the way your father taught you to count fence posts on the moor.

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Third carriage, a compartment with the blind half down. On the seat someone has left a stag's antler, pale and polished, bound with twine to a bunch of roses gone brown at the edges. Tucked under the twine is a folded sheet of graph paper with three triangles drawn in pencil, one of them shaded, and a dotted line joining their corners like a survey nobody finished. The paper smells of wet wool and something sweet.

You know those triangles. Railway surveyors cut them into the bridge parapets in 1889, and the station master's widow kept a rubbing of the one on the down platform, pinned behind the ticket hatch for forty years. You carry the bundle to the office and dial the number written on the back. It rings in an empty house in Askrigg. A woman answers on the eighth ring, and when you describe the roses she goes quiet for so long you think the line has dropped. Then she says her husband used to bring them home from the crossing when the trains still stopped there.

The first service takes the antler up the valley in a wooden crate with your name on the label. You keep the rubbing folded in quarters in your coat pocket, the way you would keep a ticket you are not sure you are allowed to use. At the end of the shift you write in the logbook: one antler, roses, no passenger, and under it, in smaller letters, a triangle drawn freehand, the shaded side facing up.