Black and grey fine line tattoo of antlers with a small flower and dotted trailing lines, placed on the back of a person's neck.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Antlers with flowers on the back of the neck

Fine line · Neck · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of the back of a neck showing a small tattoo of deer antlers decorated with a central flower and a few dotted lines hanging beneath. The linework is fine and mostly solid, with light stippling in the antler tips and petals. The tattoo is in black ink only, set against pale skin and softly blurred hair and background, with the design centred in the lower half of the frame.

Fine line Botanical Dotwork Neck Antler Deer Flower Dotted line

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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

The ferry is late again, so you walk the shingle at the north end of Scarra with an empty sack over your shoulder and the wind shoving at your back. Gulls lift off the rocks ahead of you. Your uncle says the best shed antlers wash up in October, when the stags have finished their rutting and the bone is ready to let go.

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Mr Gunn pays by the tine at the carving shed on the quay, two shillings for a good brow point and more for a whole pair that hasn't split. The weather has been wrong this year, and you have found nothing worth the walk. Then, below the cliff where the kelp is thickest, you see a pair lying crosswise over a stone. Someone has wound harebells and white clover through the base, the stems tied in tight little knots as if by a careful hand.

Beside them, a line of small hoofprints comes down out of the marram grass and stops at the water's edge, each print pressed into the sand like a full stop. You follow them with your eyes to where the tide has just turned. A grey head breaks the surface out past the skerry, swimming for the mainland with the last light on its wet brow, and it carries no antlers at all.

You stand a long while with the sack open at your feet. Then you lift the pair, flowers and all, and carry them up the path. When Mr Gunn asks what you have, you tell him nothing, you found nothing. You walk home with the sack still empty, the harebells nodding against your wrist, and the ferry comes in at last, sounding its horn over the water.