Black and grey pen-hatched antlers with three pink roses clustered at their base, drawn on a plain white background in a botanical illustration style.

Antlers with pink roses

Botanical · Mixed · Flash

The drawing shows a pair of stag-like antlers with branching tines, shaded with dense fine pen hatching that gives them a textured, grey-black appearance. Three roses in pink and dusty mauve tones sit where the antlers meet, with soft, painterly shading on the petals. The subject is isolated on a plain white background with no body or skin visible.

Botanical Realism Antler Deer Rose Flower Stag

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Now sit down and don't interrupt me, because my father told this one to me on the slipway at Seahouses, and he never once got the order of it right, so you'll have to take it as I give it. It was the back end of a bad autumn, and the Margaret Ann was hauling her net four miles off the Farne with nothing in it but weed and grief. Then the warp went heavy all at once, the way it does for a wreck or a drowned man, and Ruth Calloway at the winch swore she'd snagged the bottom. It wasn't the bottom. Tangled in the mesh was a pair of antlers, grey as slate, with the tines still sharp, and wound through the branches were three pink roses, full open, as fresh as if they'd been cut that morning from the vicar's wall.

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Nobody had seen a stag swim that far out. Ruth took her knife to the mesh and cut the antlers free with her own hands, careful of the points, and laid them on the deck by the fish box. The roses she tucked into the wheelhouse window because nobody had the heart to throw them back. The crew argued it all the way in, and by the time we tied up at the quay the petals had gone the colour of old wine, though nothing had touched them but salt air.

What happened next is the part my father always saved for last. An old woman came down from the lighthouse cottage, wrapped in a man's oilskin, and she took the antlers from the boat without asking anyone's leave. She said her husband had been a keeper out on the island, and every winter he'd walked the shingle to meet the boats, and every winter a stag had come down off the rocks to watch him go. Then the stag had stopped coming, and she had stopped looking for it.

She hung those antlers over her door, and the roses went in a jar on her sill. My father swore that every morning the Margaret Ann sailed, the petals on that sill were fresh again, and every evening she came back, they'd dropped.