Traditional style tattoo of a blue deer with stars and forget-me-not flowers above a scroll banner reading Always, on the upper arm.

Blue deer and forget-me-nots on a banner

Traditional · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A blue deer, shown in profile with its head turned to the left, is surrounded by small four-point stars and diamond shapes. Bold black outlines define the animal, with blue shading and fine hatched lines across its neck and body, and dotted detail along its flank. Clusters of blue forget-me-not flowers and green leaves sit at the base, above a black scroll banner lettered with the word Always.

Traditional Upper arm Deer Star Forget-me-not Flower Leaves Banner Scroll Always

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Agnes had climbed the broken stair of Hallow Crag every evening since the thaw, because the blue deer came to the inner ward at dusk and she had decided, against all sense, that she would be the one to see it properly. Her father kept sheep on the lower fell and had never once looked up at the keep. She carried a tin of bread crusts and a pencil stub, and she sat on the fallen lintel where the chapel roof had come down.

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The deer did not hurry. It stepped over the nettles with its head turned toward the old well, and wherever its hooves touched the flagstones, small blue flowers opened in the cracks. Agnes had counted them for nine evenings. Forget-me-nots, the vicar's wife called them, the kind that spread wherever someone had once been missed. Agnes thought that was the sort of thing people said to keep a graveyard pretty.

On the tenth evening she found the inscription on the underside of the well cover, scratched in with a nail: a stag's head, a row of stars, and one word. Always. Beneath it, in a smaller hand, was a name she recognised from the parish register, a girl who had gone up the fell in winter and never come down. Agnes had not known she was looking for anyone until she saw the name.

She did not take the bread to the deer that night. She knelt by the well and pressed her thumb into the wet moss beside the nail marks, and when she stood, the flowers at her boots had opened all the way down to the water. She wrote the girl's name on the back of her hand so she would not lose it on the walk down, and went home through the dark with the stars coming out above the broken walls.