Black fine line tattoo of a deer inside a wreath of branches and roses with the word always, on the upper back between the shoulder blades.

Deer and roses wreath on upper back

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A small black tattoo of a deer, shown from behind, sits within a circular wreath of thin branches and rose heads. The word always is written in script across the deer's body. The linework is fine and even, with no shading, and the design is centred on the upper back against a plain, softly blurred indoor background.

Fine line Botanical Back Deer Wreath Branches Rose Flower Script Always

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Now sit closer, because the hind does not come down from the tops for anyone who talks over her. She came down the night the gasworks on Tanner Street went dark, picking her way over the tram lines with a ring of briar and rose-heads trailing from her like a wreath somebody had set down on the cobbles and forgotten.

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Ferris Dunn saw her under the lamp outside the Corn Exchange, where he was supposed to be walking the bank of shutters and not standing about with his lantern going out. Across her flank, faint as writing on a steamed window, ran one word, always, and Ferris, who had never read a poem in his life, found he could not look away from it. She turned her head once, the way a woman does at a bus stop when she has decided you can be trusted, and she walked on, and he followed.

She led him past the chapel and the shuttered bakery to the canal basin, where an old woman called Agnes Fell sat on the same iron bench every night feeding the pigeons her crusts. Agnes had been waiting for a man who went out on the Halifax boat in the year of the big frost. The hind stopped in front of her, lay down in the frost-grey grass, and the briars along her back, which had been bare as wire, opened white in the cold without a single leaf.

At first light Ferris went back for his lantern. The bench was empty. There was only one rose-head pressed to the slats, and beside it, scratched into the frost on the iron, the word always. The council has painted that bench green four times since, Ferris says, and every spring the briar comes up through the paint.