Black ink pen drawing of a bearded man in profile with tree-like branches growing from his head, shown as a tattoo design sketch on white paper.

Bearded man with branching antlers

Black and grey · Flash

A pen drawing of a bearded man in profile, with a long braided beard and an intense eye, and bare, twisting branches or antlers rising from the top of his head. The linework uses dense hatching and fine strokes to build shading in the face and hair, with loose, scratchy lines on the branches. The drawing is in black ink only, and is shown flat on paper against a grey surface.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, and mind the embers, because this is the part where the old ones lowered their voices. My grandmother's grandmother knew a forester called Aldric Thorn, who kept the slopes below the Blackmere pines. He had a beard so long he braided it every morning with strips of hide, and he never once cut a tree he had not first asked.

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One winter the lord's men came up the valley with axes, wanting timber for a new hall. Aldric stood in the snow at the edge of the wood and said no. They laughed at him. The captain said a man with a beard like that had nothing to bargain with, and swung first.

Aldric did not raise a hand. He only closed his eyes, and the oldest pine behind him groaned, and its branches began to lift, one by one, like fingers unfolding from a fist. Twigs pushed up through his scalp and out through his hair, and where they split the bark, the grey wood grew over his temples like a crown. The men dropped their axes and ran. The captain was found days later sitting against a stump, his hair full of seed, able to say nothing but the calls of birds.

Aldric walked on into the wood with antlers of living oak and never came back down to the valley. But the forester's children say that on the first hard frost, if you go to the edge of the Blackmere and ask politely, a bent old man with a braided beard will hand you a fallen branch that is always exactly the right length for a walking stick.

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