Black and grey blackwork tattoo of a bearded man's face under a crown of antler-like branches, covering the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Bearded man with antlered branches on upper arm

Blackwork · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A large tattoo shows a bearded man's face in profile, with long flowing hair and beard, beneath a crown of bare, branching antler or tree-like forms. The linework is fine and sketchy, with shading built from hatching and textured strokes. The piece is black and grey, photographed at an angle on a pale patterned background.

Blackwork Upper arm Face Antler Branches Tree Beard Hair

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody at the reunion could agree on the year, but all of us remembered Mr Ashdown taking the Year Nine biology group into Hollin Wood on the last Friday of every summer term. He never called it a field trip. He would stop at the stile, hands deep in his cardigan pockets, and say the wood would give us one thing each and we had better know what we were taking.

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By nine o'clock the sports hall smelled of warm crisps and cheap wine, and Dawn Pritchard was wearing a name badge that still said Dawn Pritchard, Year Nine, Heathfield, in a font nobody under forty would have chosen. She pressed a paper cup into my hand. 'Did you ever go back to Hollin?' I said the council had put a bypass through it years ago, that the trees were chipped into mulch and sold to a landscaping firm. She nodded as if she had expected that. 'He still had the stick, you know. Hazel, with the fork at the top, like a crown. He said it had grown up around a stag's skull he found in a ditch.' I had forgotten the stick entirely until she said it.

I drove out at eleven with the windows down. The stile was gone, but the hedge still ran along the old boundary, and at its end stood one oak the diggers had left, its top half bare and tangled against the orange sky like something that had decided to stay. I climbed the bank in my good shoes. Between two roots I found a fallen fork of grey wood, light as paper, its tines spread wide, and I thought about a man who had made us stand still long enough to notice what we were carrying.

I put it in my jacket pocket and drove home. It sits on the hook by my front door now, and every morning my keys go on the hook beside it while I decide what I am carrying today.