Line drawing of crossed antlers with a hanging dreamcatcher and feather, shaded from red to blue, shown as a tattoo design on white.

Crossed antlers with dreamcatcher and feather

Colour · Flash

A pen-and-ink drawing of a pair of antlers crossed at the base, with a dreamcatcher hanging from the centre and a feather below it. The antlers and feather are built from dense hatching and stipple, with small geometric marks along the antler tines. The ink fades from red-purple at the top to deep blue at the feather tip, against a plain white background.

Antler Dreamcatcher Feather Deer

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The stag came down to the lower field the week the snow stopped, and you watched him from the kitchen window while the kettle went cold. Your grandmother's pair of antlers hung crossed over the back door where she had nailed them in 1961, and everyone on Hollin Farm agreed they were bad luck to take down. Her dreamcatcher swung from the knot between them, its willow ring gone grey, the sinew web still tight enough to keep the draught out of the porch.

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You took the shotgun from the rack, then put it back. Your dad would have. The stag stood broadside in the frost-white hedge, breath going up in two slow clouds, and he looked at the house the way a man reads a letter he already knows the ending of. Pete from the next farm had said the herd was starving, that the bracken was buried and the deer were coming in for turnips, for the silage pit, for anything at all. You had one bale of hay left that nobody had promised to anyone.

So you carried it out in your wellies, past the dog who would not follow, and left it by the gap in the fence. Then you went back in and stood beneath the antlers until the kettle finally shrieked. In the morning the bale was split open and the stag's tracks ran uphill toward the quarry. Somewhere in the ash tree a single grey feather had caught on the twine of the dreamcatcher, turning slowly in the cold as if someone had hung it there on purpose, and you left it where it was.