Black and grey stag head with antlers above three roses with red watercolour splashes, tattooed on the upper thigh.

Deer and roses on a thigh

Realism · Thigh · Mixed · Photo

A stag's head with branching antlers sits above three roses, two of them shaded in black and grey and one left mostly white. The deer is drawn with fine stippling and detailed shading, while red watercolour-style washes and splashes fill the area behind and around the flowers. The design is centred on the upper thigh and fills the frame with a balance of dark linework and soft red.

Realism Botanical Thigh Deer Stag Antler Rose Flower Watercolour

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The roses had been cut at dawn, and by three in the afternoon the barn was hot enough to wilt them. Ruth Calloway stood on an upturned crate with a jug of water and a box of florist's wire, reviving what she could, while the string quartet tuned up somewhere behind the hay bales.

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Above the bar hung the stag. Gordon Pryce had shot it on the ridge the autumn before the year the farms closed, and his widow had hung its head in the barn because she could not bear to burn it. Its glass eyes were the colour of weak tea. The bride, Tess, had asked three times for it to come down. Owen, her groom, had said only that his father had loved the place, and that was the end of it. Nobody had thought to ask the stag.

At four, Owen's grandmother Mair came in with a plate of shortbread and stopped in front of the head. "He looked like that the morning we found him," she said. "Like he'd only just heard us coming." Then she took a white rose from Ruth's jug and walked it to the foot of the mount. "Gordon never liked red roses. Said they made a room look like a butcher's."

Ruth finished the buttonholes. When the guests began to drift in under the lights, the red wash on the wall behind the bar had darkened to the colour of the wine being poured. By the first dance, the white rose at the foot of the wood had blushed pink along its edges, and nobody in the barn thought to mention it.