Black and grey realism tattoo of a deer with large antlers standing among pine trees, across the upper arm.

Deer and pine forest on upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A large tattoo shows a deer with a full set of antlers facing the viewer, set within a misty forest of pine trees. The deer and trees are rendered in fine shading with soft grey gradients, and grass in the foreground is drawn with fine strokes. The design fills most of the frame in black and grey ink, with the darker pines framing the animal on both sides.

Realism Upper arm Deer Antler Forest Pine tree Grass Wildlife

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ruth found the missing antler under the bottom boards of the carousel, where the lorry had shaken it loose somewhere between Gloucester and the coast. It was a long tine of lime wood, pale at the break and dark with fifty years of hands. The stag it belonged to stood fourth from the end of the outer row, and since the storm it had looked lopsided, like a man who had lost his hat and not noticed.

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The carver's notebook was in a biscuit tin in the office caravan, under receipts and a rosary someone had left behind in Taunton. Albert Crane had drawn every animal before he cut it. The stag's page was pencil, facing the reader head on, antlers spread wide, and behind it a crowd of pines rubbed out at their tips so they seemed to dissolve into morning fog. Beneath the grass he had drawn short, impatient strokes, the way a man draws when he has been out in the wet too long. In the margin, in a neater hand, he had written: Keep his eyes on the gate.

Ruth worked through the night with the generator thudding outside and the other showmen snoring in their vans. She matched the grain, pinned the new tine with a brass dowel, and sanded until her fingers stung. By four the lights were off and the field was just dark grass and the black shapes of the rides against the sky.

At dawn she hauled the stag back onto its pole and bolted the platform down. When the first children came running across the wet field, the carousel turned, and the stag swung round until it faced the gate, both antlers up, looking at them as if it had been waiting all along.