Black antler outline tattoo on the upper arm of a woman wearing a white studded vest top, in a fine line style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Antlers tattoo on an upper arm

Fine line · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A pair of black antlers is drawn in thin, branching lines on the upper arm, mirrored either side of a central point. The ink is solid black with no shading or colour. The arm fills the right side of the frame against a pale background, with a white vest top covered in metal studs at the left edge.

Fine line Upper arm Antler Deer

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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

Shift along, the lot of you, and mind the drip off that awning. It has rained since Tuesday as if the sky owes the fishmonger money. You want the one about the stag who sold his crown to a pie man? No? Then listen anyway. Nobody leaves a story half told in the wet.

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Up above Wexley there was a stag called Ivo Thorne, though only the old woman on the bottom stall ever used his name. He carried a pair of racks so wide that when he walked the hedgerows in frost they combed the low branches clean. Each spring the antlers dropped into the bracken, and each autumn they grew back, splitting into thin dark tines like a child's drawing of a winter tree.

One November a boy called Callum Pryce came down from the quarry with an empty sack and a debt. His father had wagered the lower field on a cockerel fight and lost, and the only buyer in three parishes was the man who collected bone for the lime kilns. Callum found the stag at the edge of the beech wood, waiting. Ivo lowered his head, which is the only bargain a stag ever makes, and said, take what you need, and come back when the harvest is in.

Callum took one shed antler down to the kilns and paid his father's debt with it. He brought the other to me, wrapped in a feed sack, and asked if I would keep it dry. I have, and it hangs above my stall still, rain running off the points. When the crowds thin I swear I hear hooves on the cobbles, polite as a cough.