Colour realism tattoo of an outlined buck symbol filled with green and brown camouflage foliage, placed on the upper arm near the shoulder.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Buck symbol filled with camouflage on upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A stylised buck symbol with a bold black outline sits on the upper arm, reaching towards the shoulder. Its interior is filled with a camouflage pattern of leaves, branches and bark in muted greens, browns and tans. The shading is soft and detailed, and the design fills the frame against a plain skin background.

Realism Upper arm Leaves Foliage Branches Bark Outline

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The wood above Ashcombe pit was already losing its leaves when you first saw the buck, pressed flat in the mud by the lamp-house door. Someone had carved it into a split of ash, the antlers curling like the ends of a fiddle, and the bark around it had been stripped so the pale grain showed through. Your father said a man from the coke ovens had left it to mark a bet he'd lost, which made no sense, but you kept it in your coat pocket for a week anyway.

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Mornings you went up the lane before the hooter, boots cold, to stand where the trees met the slag heaps. The men said deer came down in winter because the ground stayed warm, and you believed them because you wanted something in that valley to choose its own way. The leaves came and went in the same greens and browns as your father's jacket, so that from ten yards the wood and the men were hard to tell apart.

The morning the cage stuck at four hundred feet, you were the one who ran up the lane instead of down. Nobody had told you to. The buck stood at the edge of the trees with its head low, grazing the frost off the bracken, and when you came close it lifted its head, looked at the pithead, and walked back into the leaves without a sound. You stood there until the shouting from the yard reached you, counting the men who came out of the cage one by one.

Ashcombe still has its wood. The pit shut in the nineties and the ovens went with it, but on still mornings you can hear the hooter in your head, and if you look hard at the bark you can see a shape that is almost something else. You never carved another one. You kept the split ash on the windowsill, and every autumn you still go up the lane before light to see whether the buck has come back down to the warm ground.