Two people cropped at the midriff, each with a black buck symbol tattoo on the lower abdomen, one in a pink bikini and one in a red star-patterned bikini.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black buck symbol tattoos on two midriffs

Other · Black and grey · Photo

The photograph shows two people from the midriff down, standing side by side outdoors with trees behind them. Each has a solid black tattoo of a stylised buck symbol on the lower abdomen, with bold, simple shapes and no visible shading. The ink is black only, set against bare skin, pink and red bikini bottoms and green foliage.

Other Deer Symbol Bikini

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the fire won't keep you warm from over there. My grandmother's grandmother knew the buck that walked the edge of Hollin Wood, the one with a mark cut into his flank like a letter nobody could read. The village children would dare each other to stand at the stile at dusk and whistle for him.

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Tom Ashby's girl, Nell, took the dare one October. She was nine and had no fear in her yet. She whistled, and the buck came out of the bracken with mist hanging off his antlers, and he did not run. He walked to the stile and lowered his head, and Nell saw that the mark on his side was no wound at all but a shape the fog had drawn there, the same shape her father cut above the forge door.

Her father had carved it for luck, he said, to keep blight off the barley. But the buck wanted it back. Every wood keeps its tallies, and the old ones remember what is owed. Nell understood the thing wanted a promise rather than a payment, so she said she would come back each autumn and leave salt on the stone.

She kept that promise for sixty years. When she was too old to walk the lane, her great-niece carried the salt up instead, and the buck was there, grey at the muzzle, waiting with his head low. So if you go up to the stile tonight, mind you whistle soft, and bring something to leave on the stone.